X and Windfall
X. I’ve been a fan of Ti West’s work for longer than I care to remember. Sometime more a decade ago, I heard him interviewed and was intrigued enough by what I heard to explore his work. Back then, due to his relatively brief CV, the ubiquity of DVD rental and the lost, sought-after abundance of free time, it was easily accomplished. If memory serves, he was promoting House of the Devil (2009) at the time, a delightfully lugubrious paean to the horror movies of his (our) youth. Before I saw that, though, I watched Trigger Man (2007), a micro-budget walk in the woods turned fight for the lives of three city boys who decide to give deer hunting a try. By that time, I was pretty well-soured on the found-footage-shaky-cam exploitation pictures that had grown so abundant following the (in hindsight, lamentable) success of The Blair Witch Project (1999). So, I was skeptical, if optimistic. But West did something imaginative, referential to shared interests and stylish; there was something essential and true to the spirit of independent cinema in it. It was also funny and scary without winking at the audience. House of the Devil, with its more-elaborate production design and cinematic technique, is perhaps a better indicator of the trajectory of West’s career and aesthetic, but it shares a sense of revelry and reverence for the form that, for the genre’s ascendence, remain rare attributes. It’s clear he understands what makes horror movies fun, that laughter and terror are almost-twinned catharses and that style springs primarily from imagination and technique, rather than wellsprings of cash. West hasn’t made a feature in six years, since In a Valley of Violence, a Western I failed to warm to and is probably worth revisiting. In the interim, he’s directed a lot of television, none of which I’ve seen. But he’s back in a big way with X, a supernatural slasher sex picture that both sums up and advances his body of work. In Houston, 1979 (actually New Zealand in the midst of the pandemic), Wayne (Martin Henderson), the sleazily avuncular, surprisingly sage proprietor of a strip club, sets out into the hinterland with big dreams. He brings along Maxine (Mia Goth) and Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), dancers from the club with personalities as different as their looks, and Jackson (Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi), a three-tour Marine Corps Vietnam veteran with an abundant…