X (2022)

It's a story about some Houston strip club workers, circa 1979, renting a guest house on a Texan farm to film hardcore pornography. Mia Goth and her merry band of misfits drive their "Plowing Service" van out into the deep red Texas (which looks a lot like New Zealand).

They're met by the deeply stereotypical old, white, shotgun-bearing farmer who hates the government, young people, and black people. He's most unwelcoming. A haunting choir hums whenever the farmer's slow-motion wife inches around in the distance. When we finally get close enough to see her, she looks like a young person in old lady makeup (because she is, hello again Mia Goth). The farmer's 200-year-old wife just wants to be considered sexy again, which is more or less what the whole thing is about.

Mia Goth scenes are made suspenseful through the age-old trick of just having her look uncomfortable and move unnaturally slowly. Moving unnaturally slowly is a trick they fall back on many times, in fact. After enough of it, it stops feeling suspenseful and starts feeling… well, slow. The old people do everything in slow motion, so their scenes take too damned long.

Sound girl Jenna Ortega (Wednesday) mostly stares judgmentally at the others. She triggers the unnecessary scene where they explain to us why it's morally ok to do porn, and then the much, much less necessary scene where they sing over an acoustic guitar while the camera pans around. By the end of the track, Jenna's whole personality is renewed and she wants to be a porn star, which she solves a few seconds later.

Jenna's boyfriend, the camera man, is having none of it and tries to drive off. He doesn't make it, and they really put the slash in slasher. It's about time, over an hour in. Unfortunately, it's followed by a slow dance scene.

Every shot is a like the perfect schoolbook example of how you would do that shot. The opening shot is really good; it's framed through a barn so it looks like a 4:3 aspect ratio film frame, but, after a while, the camera moves forward revealing normal widescreen. The lighting, on the other hand, is often either flat or downright too dark. Something about the cinematography feels too "clean," and it actually improves when it pretends we're looking through the porn film camera.

They carefully ensure to briefly shows us a bunch of objects and locations so it can use them later. They do it so much and so obviously, and combined with the textbook cinematography, that it comes off a bit like this movie is a PhD thesis from Filmmaker University.

The porn kids don't even defeat the killers; the great victory is entirely by accident. Goth leaves without actually checking if anyone else is alive, which she doesn't know, though she isn't a particularly ethical character so that's not necessarily an oversight.

It has this longing to be more meaningful than just a horror slasher film. It touches on societal problems, psychological problems, interpersonal problems, human problems… but it either doesn't have enough to say or doesn't know how to say it, because all we actually get out of it is a well-shot but boring horror slasher film. Too bad, I had such I hopes for this series.