X (2022)

Ti West’s first in a trilogy of scratchy slasher flicks (the follow up to X, Pearl, was released last month) stars Mia Goth as both Maxine, an aspiring adult film star, and Pearl, an old woman who owns a farm with her husband in which Maxine and her colleagues intend to shoot a porn film.

Goth is fast becoming one of the biggest names in film; her turn in Infinity Pool earlier this year was quite terrifying, and she continues that loose canon approach here, to great effect. Maxine makes for an interesting character, an ingredient in slasher that seems so simple to achieve and yet is frequently forgone in favour of blood and gore. X wears its influences on its sleeve, West isn’t afraid to invoke The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or Psycho (1960) as well as showing a poster in one scene for Debbie Does Dallas, a famous 1978 porn film. West also achieves an excellent sense of time and setting, X feels like a seventies grindhouse slasher replete with explicit sex and violence, and it could almost be a full version of a trailer from Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse (2007), a full feature we never actually got to see in the UK.

X falls down slightly in the sense that it’s not remotely scary, but there’s enough jump scares to keep you engaged if you like that sort of thing; more promisingly though, West is fully confident in his project and it shows- a teaser trailer for MaXXXine has already emerged despite the fact it hasn’t started filming yet, but there’s more than enough in X to ensure that this film fan will be watching Pearl in the near future. 6.7/10