Ti West's X (2022 film) begins where most slashers end, with police cars on a lonely farm road and body bags on the grass. The device announces the movie's real interest. This is not a mystery about who will die; it is a question of how the story got there, and West's answer doubles as a short essay on ambition, aging, and the camera's appetite for both.
The premise is simple and loaded. In 1979, a small crew from Houston rents a guesthouse on an elderly couple's rural Texas farm to shoot an adult film, and the shoot goes very badly. West treats the setup as a mirror. The visitors want to be remembered. The hosts cannot bear being forgotten. The collision produces the genre's oldest choreography with a genuinely sorrowful undertow. This connects to our earlier piece, Project Hail Mary (film) showtimes: how the theatrical release unfolded.
What X (2022 film) understands about wanting
Mia Goth plays Maxine, a stripper with a plan, a habit, and a televangelist father whose sermons flicker on farmhouse televisions like a guilty conscience. Goth also plays Pearl, the farmer's wife, under heavy prosthetics. The double casting is not a stunt; it is the thesis. Pearl once looked like Maxine, and Maxine, the film quietly insists, could one day become Pearl.
West stages the connection in plain daylight. Pearl watches Maxine swim in the lake, and her face carries envy, grief, and hunger in a single held shot. Later she stands in the barn while a scene is filmed, imagining herself in the younger woman's place. These moments give the mayhem its weight. When the killing starts, it plays as warped jealousy and grief, not random menace.
The supporting crew is drawn in quick, confident strokes. Wayne, the producer with big dreams, rambles about crossover potential. RJ, the serious young director, defends his artistic intentions even on a porn shoot. Brittany Snow's Bobby-Lynne and Scott Mescudi's Jackson treat the work as work. Jenna Ortega's Lorraine, the shy girlfriend who asks to join the production, carries the film's sharpest irony about respectability.
The farmhouse as a time capsule
X (2022 film) was shot in New Zealand, doubling for Texas, and dressed in 1979 with evident affection: soft rock on the radio, wood paneling, a van that could not exist in any other decade. A24 released the picture in theaters on March 18, 2022, after a South by Southwest premiere, and its polish startled viewers who expected rough grindhouse pastiche. The pastiche is present, but the craft is precise.
The references are worn openly, from Texas Chain Saw weather to Psycho architecture and a Shining-style axe beat. West cites his sources without drowning in them. The score, by Tyler Bates and Chelsea Wolfe, slides from period needle drops into a low drone, as if the farm itself were listening.
Where the violence lands (spoilers ahead)
Spoilers follow in this section. The murders arrive in one long night of escalating cruelty. RJ, trying to drive away and strand the group, rebuffs Pearl's advance and is stabbed in the neck and beheaded. Wayne steps on a nail and takes a pitchfork through the eyes. Jackson is shot by Howard. Bobby-Lynne is pushed into the lake and taken by the alligator the film has shown circling since early on. Lorraine, locked in a basement beside a hanging corpse, breaks out only to be shot at the front door.
The infamous scene lands differently from all the rest. Pearl undresses and climbs into bed beside the sleeping Maxine, caressing her, and Maxine wakes to the face of her own future. It is frightening and pitiable at once, the film's whole idea compressed into one bed. The finale, in which the recoil of her own gun breaks Pearl's hip and Maxine reverses a truck over her head, is nastier and stranger than a victory lap. The closing reveal, that Maxine is the preacher's daughter heard on every television, reframes the story as an escape from one kind of performance into another.
The discipline underneath the blood
West edited the film himself, and the control shows in the long daytime stretch between arrival and death, where dread builds through glances rather than stings. The first hour is patient and the last half hour is ruthless. X (2022 film) is, above all, a director's picture, and the cast meets it at every turn.
Conclusion: a slasher that cuts both ways
X (2022 film) reaches for the full weight of its characters' fears and, more often than not, touches it. The movie is not as radical as its loudest admirers claim, nor as cynical as its detractors fear. It is a craftsmanlike horror picture with a sorrowful heart, a wicked streak, and a post-credits teaser that promised the prequel Pearl before most viewers knew it existed. For a story about people desperate to be watched, it argues that being remembered is the only survival that counts.
