X/Pearl/MaXXXine (Ti West, 2022-2024)

[therewillbeblus]

Ti West's next horror film, titled X, will shoot in New Zealand for A24 and BRON, starring Mia Goth, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi

Not exactly a surprise since his sister is a leader at BRON studios, but Sam Levinson is sliding on as a producer

[therewillbeblus]

Ti West's next horror film, titled X, will shoot in New Zealand for A24 and BRON, starring Mia Goth, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi

Not exactly a surprise since his sister is a leader at BRON studios, but Sam Levinson is sliding on as a producer

This comes out Friday and is getting stellar reviews signaling another successfully revamped love letter to 70s/80s horror a la House of the Devil

[Finch]

I've been rooting for Ti West since House and The Innkeepers. The Sacrament was pretty disappointing so I'm very happy to hear X is getting good notices.

[therewillbeblus]

I've been rooting for Ti West since House and The Innkeepers. The Sacrament was pretty disappointing so I'm very happy to hear X is getting good notices.

I don't like The Sacrament either, but his last film, In a Valley of Violence, was some good fun, if not quite the pristinely refurbished twist on the familiar that one wants a Ti West genre film to be

[therewillbeblus]

Apparently Ti West shot a prequel to X in secret, and A24 will screen footage during theatrical screenings

[DarkImbecile]

This comes out Friday and is getting stellar reviews signaling another successfully revamped love letter to 70s/80s horror a la House of the Devil

Ti West's X is quite fun, unabashedly indulging in both delightfully gross violence and — more notably, in my book — pointedly titillating sex in an increasingly chaste cinematic landscape; on the other hand, I don't think it's anywhere near as much of an exercise in playing in the sandbox of another era's genre tropes and formal mechanics as House of the Devil. Instead, West seems primarily interested in toying with ideas about sex and aging, sex and youth, sex and freedom, and, of course, the entanglement of sex and violence in the American mind*, and while the execution is sometimes uneven, I think this is his most successful film since that early hit.

It certainly helps that the cast works extremely well within the constructs of West's script: Mia Goth is pretty perfectly cast as an ambitious Texas girl determined to use what she has to get ahead (and get away), and she delivers a mix of sexiness and steely resolve — but, to my surprise, Brittany Snow more or less steals the movie every time she's in the frame, not least with a surprising

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show-stopping musical interlude!

Snow's not an actor I've taken particular notice of before that I can remember, but she'd be pretty great in this funny, confident sexpot mode as a lead/co-lead in almost any genre.

Finally, the post-credits trailer for Pearl, the simultaneously shot prequel that also stars Goth, looks quite fun as well, with a markedly different visual palette that looks different than anything West has ever done before. Hopefully these films are enough of a success to keep West working regularly, as he's one of this genre's more distinctive talents.

*I found it darkly amusing that my audience's most visceral reaction to anything onscreen was far and away

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the moment when two elderly people start having sex, and not one of the many gory dismemberments.

[DarkImbecile]

I forgot to mention: there's also a very cleverly done opening shot here — nothing overly flashy but reflective of the above-average talent West has for compositions — that put me in a good mood for the rest of the film. Enough other sequences feature memorable shots as well — an overhead of Goth swimming in a pond and a long take of a woman dancing while silhouetted by headlights stand out in particular — to lend an air of considered artistry to what could tip over into sleaze pretty easily (and may anyway, for some people).

In addition, the era-appropriate soundtrack is quite a lot of fun, with some needle drops winningly on the nose and others more subtly underlining the scene, but cumulatively X's music makes it one of those rare movies leaning heavily on pop songs that still made me consider buying the soundtrack.

[domino harvey]

Snow's not an actor I've taken particular notice of before that I can remember, but she'd be pretty great in this funny, confident sexpot mode as a lead/co-lead in almost any genre.

She’ll always be the whitebread goody-goody teenager experiencing the mid-60s in American Dreams to me, which sounds like a role as far from this as you can get!

[therewillbeblus]

I loved this, and agree with DI that it's handedly West's best since House of the Devil, complete with a strong windup, emulating a hangout movie at times, albeit one with no fat on the bones and always managing to push ahead with deliberate forward momentum. West cares as much about characters as he does the technical precision of creating tension and emulating horror staples, and he's quite talented at squeezing a lot of juice out of brief pockets of interplay, coloring these people in enough to make us want to spend hours with them. In many ways, this is an homage to the classics- in structure it's a person-out-of-environment slasher like Texas Chainsaw, though West intentionally includes many specific details and setpieces that wink hard at other classics (including at least one that came out after this film takes place).

Outside of this recognition, the film pulls a very clever and novel twist on the subgenre

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where instead of sex-obsessed teens pitted against puritanical outsiders, in which a generational or ideological gap sparks violence, sexual repression is the impetus for the elderly killers' death toll! The horror element essentially boils down to old people being deprived of sex, jealous of youth, and unexpectedly devoid of Higher Morals; they desperately want (or need) to fuck, not punish based on preconceived religious prudence. [Oh, and in a much smaller example of challenging norms, I appreciated how all three females survived longer than the three males, rather than oscillating back and forth between genders- this alone shook up the predictable rhythm of deaths while still following a predictable path of picking off the troop one by one.]

West also unapologetically knows that old people are creepy to the masses, and pushes the inherent creepiness of the frightening alienness born from generational gaps to its limits. The tone vacillates between terror and hilarity, occasionally managing to sustain multiple tones at once

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(particularly the post-Psycho-overload stabbing car dance that goes on and on, and the Landslide musical interlude as the film's centerpiece, which made me smile and laugh and also quiver with deep sadness - effectively meditating on the tragedy of the old woman's powerless predicament with sincerity, simultaneous with the cheeky prodding)

all under the clear tent pole of a classic slasher. In its own twisted way, this is an existential horror glaring at the inevitability of aging, loss (of vitality, abilities, choice, opportunities, time), self-reflexively playing with the elusive nature of stardom, whether in the movies or reinforcing the egocentric nature of feeling special in youth, one's narrative paved ahead as the star of their own "movie" in life. This duality is especially brilliant in its self-referentiality when you realize

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Mia Goth plays the old lady too(!)

which is an important consideration when indisputably crowning this her career-best performance.

[brundlefly]

“The kid says we’re gonna lose the light.”

One of the things I found interesting about this is how it’s smartly set at the crossroads of sex and violence but the filmmaking itself isn’t excited. It’s not purposeful enough to be a horny or angry outburst; it’s a sad ache chockablock with loaded elements it picks up and puts down haphazardly. As DI says, it’s toying, and there are a lot of instances where it feels like it’s wasting its smarts on cleverness instead of depth. It has a sterling first hour and offers a lot that’s fun to think about. But it feels a missed opportunity to plant a stake at such prime cinematic real estate – the rural environs of Leatherface in the birth-state and year of the Moral Majority, the year after Michael Meyers and Debbie started doing things, the year before Jason Voorhees and Ronald Reagan scored their biggest roles – to do so without much of a philosophy and to come away without too much of point.

But then frustration as both topic and method is a toy in its chest, one sometimes gleefully deployed, so perhaps a wholly satisfying film would be thematically inappropriate.

I was surprised by its conservative attitudes toward sex, its self-defeating approach toward aging, and how casually it tossed away opportunities to say something about sex, violence, and filmmaking.

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The attitudes re: sex are at least interestingly complicated, and as twbb notes a welcome change from the hedonist/puritan dichotomy. There’s merely a disparity in access and motivation. The younger people who are having sex aren’t as free-thinking and sex-positive as they seem; their sex has been commodified, corrupted. Bobby-Lynne brags about faking her orgasms; Maxine needs to get high to perform and there are hints of abuse in her background; both are matter-of-fact about the sex being a means to an end. Jackson’s a bit of a question mark, but despite declaring he was born for this, there’s as much unspoken racism in his industry role as there is between him and Howard. Wayne gets as excited over potential profit as anything else and is given to predatory pronouncements like, “Better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.” RJ is the only one who ever openly objects to any of the sex, thinks himself above the enterprise all along, and of course is the first to die.

The only one of the crew who wants to fuck for fuck’s sake is the Church Mouse, and West first telegraphs this by framing a scene so we ignore the people having sex and watch her watching. Watching’s the most sexual thing one can do in a movie. (RJ is just working.) Instead of being punished for sex, the standard model American slasher m.o., Church Mouse is instead killed at the moment she blames the sex for everything that’s gone wrong.

Pearl, of course, wants to fuck and wants to fuck a lot. (There’s still a fresh body in the basement.) And Howard, bless his failing heart, is more than willing to accept her bisexuality and have an open relationship. He may be more willing to kidnap and imprison people than order a vibrator, but then everybody’s got their something. They have an honest understanding and a tender, loving relationship which unfortunately leads to deeply criminal acts. And when they do have sex together, we’re made to understand that it is comicly gross.

So, sex: Empty and corrupt, or heartfelt, criminal, and disgusting. At base moments, the characters themselves think this: Pearl calls both actresses whores, Maxine calls Pearl a “sex fiend.”

In its own twisted way, this is an existential horror glaring at the inevitability of aging, loss (of vitality, abilities, choice, opportunities, time), self-reflexively playing with the elusive nature of stardom, whether in the movies or reinforcing the egocentric nature of feeling special in youth, one's narrative paved ahead as the star of their own "movie" in life

I vibe with this read; I think it’s impossible to conceive such unlikely, impractical antagonists, to muster sympathy for them, and not think West’s not trying to say something about aging. Could even see distorting the first hour in the guest house as Pearl’s fantasized reminiscence, a diorama of could-have-beens. It is mostly a sad film. It plays at time-displacement in the tiniest of ways, occasionally flash cross-cutting into the next scene. The script’s addicted to callback dialogue, usually traded between generations (“once a marine, always a marine;” “our little secret;” “divine intervention;” “I will not accept a life I do not deserve”). And I like the way the sex punishment has been replaced by the brand of retribution that stems from a resentment that longs to perpetuate any suffered injustice in the bastardized name of fairness. Why should you get to have it all. Someday all this will be taken from you like it was from me.

I do not know that true notions of the me/greatest generational divide ever land. Both because the movie works to forge a Maxine-Pearl connection and because making the Pearl-Harold relationship sexually open upends expectations that severs ties with the upcoming political wave. There’s an element of sacrifice – Howard’s two wars away, Pearl’s career – but that’s not cut and dry either as Jackson’s also served and the younger party’s backgrounds aren’t painted as posh. The horror simply relies on young people naturally finding old people as terrifying as a lot of old people naturally find young people terrifying.

And I feel the central stunt is distracting to the point of being insulting (almost the same way The Night House diluted its central character’s desperation with elaborate camera tricks). There are simpler ways to connect Maxine and Pearl without gooping on the latex. Betrays that notion of inevitability when you’ve had a “Creature Fabrication” team exaggerating the potential disgustingness of Pearl’s body when her actions are enough to make her some kind of monster.

Though on the plus side, Goth does get to make a grab at the sort of infamy Divine enjoyed when he raped himself in Female Trouble.

there's also a very cleverly done opening shot here — nothing overly flashy but reflective of the above-average talent West has for compositions — that put me in a good mood for the rest of the film.

Same by half; it’s an instant infusion of goodwill. That shot is so simple and ingenious I wondered if lifted it from somewhere. The shot in front of the car headlights is repurposed from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it’s swell. And that’s the third unexpected dance number I’ve seen in a new movie this year – there’s a sort of one in House of the Devil as well – but those are never unwelcome.

That first kill scene is dandy. Ti West, whose documentary filmmaker character IIRC was the first dinner guest to die in You’re Next, knows the value in offing a director. It’s Pearl wresting control of the movie away. There’s to be no more cute intercutting with “Farmer’s Daughters,” there’s no reason for those people to be there except to be killed or be hers. It’s the only real glimpse of her libido in the film, and it can be indiscriminate, splashy, emphatic, triumphant.

It’s also… the last good kill scene? There’s so much energy put into passing details (Bobby-Lynne’s death is teased by the painting on the side of the Bayou Burlesque, there’s a photo of the basement hippie on a milk carton) and so little into the big steps. Wayne’s death is the dumbest thing I’ve watched in a while. The most notable death in the second half of the film was that of the second half of the film.

Is the final Pearl/Maxine confrontation supposed to be… an argument? Does someone win it? Is the revelation about Maxine’s father supposed to land with such a limp shrug? (Even she doesn’t react when she sees him on TV in the gas station.) The movie knows religion belongs in there somewhere, doesn’t know where to put it, so it just hangs around.

[therewillbeblus]

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Is the revelation about Maxine’s father supposed to land with such a limp shrug? (Even she doesn’t react when she sees him on TV in the gas station.) The movie knows religion belongs in there somewhere, doesn’t know where to put it, so it just hangs around.

That's a fair point about the circumferential approach to religion, but I still think it's used well to evoke a couple of intelligent late-game inverted-trope jokes:

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One is that the old couple have the religion channel on the TV, are always watching it, but their own lifestyles ascend the simplistic suppression Maxine's father calls for- perhaps a sly commentary on how we as audiences are consuming content we know to be fictional and are behaving differently in our lives than what our desires are on screen? This is totally backwards though- for while we realise inappropriate drives through the medium, does the old couple realise the ease and simplicity of groundedness from their little screen? Do they want to be like the puritanical old couple from horror movies, but just know life is too complex, and use the reverend's speech as a way to block out the noise and engage delusionally- kinda like us?!

Which brings me to the second inversion- that the film ends with a contrived revelation of "oh he's her father" knowingly reduces the complexity of the meditations on the elusive power of meaningful egocentricity, by making Maxine the star of the movie with winking artifice, tying up this bit of enigmatic frustration with an uncanny coincidence of tangibility. West has been juggling expected characterizations, narrative beats, kills, and needledrops etc. along with holding space for this baffling eccentricity that challenges expectations of shallow villain motives the entire time- so it's fitting that the film would end on a reminder that things in this film have not actually been so cut-and-dry as the professions of the reverend on the screen demand.

And that recalls another twist: that instead of the villainous couple being the dehumanized, oversimplified mechanical foes of naked rationales for their behavior, it's Maxine the protagonist who ultimately is gifted/cursed that brand! The couple are morally wrong, but their impetuses are deeply complicated and their day-to-day tragic lives encompassing a loss none of us who are young enough to still 'do' things (basically the entire audience of this film) can understand.. so regardless of that immorality, they are humanized and allowed to be layered without spelling out for us what that all entails, since we can't 'know' their truth of somatic loss. The reveal on the TV seems to indicate that Maxine did porn because her father was a minister and repressed her from actualizing agency, pure and simple, x=y. It's obviously not that clearcut, but West allows it to be that way for us, whereas he never allows the old couple to rest in a unidimensional place of surface-level behavioral formulations- tipping the scale towards Pearl's psychology and away from Maxine's as the one of interest worth exploring- makes sense why there's a prequel coming!

So religion feels like an expected device that forces reactionary projections onto the unexpected party at the unexpected time, repurposed as another irony implemented under the skeleton of a paint-by-numbers homage.

[brundlefly]

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One is that the old couple have the religion channel on the TV, are always watching it, but their own lifestyles ascend the simplistic suppression Maxine's father calls for- perhaps a sly commentary on how we as audiences are consuming content we know to be fictional and are behaving differently in our lives than what our desires are on screen? This is totally backwards though- for while we realise inappropriate drives through the medium, does the old couple realise the ease and simplicity of groundedness from their little screen? Do they want to be like the puritanical old couple from horror movies, but just know life is too complex, and use the reverend's speech as a way to block out the noise and engage delusionally

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Do we see them watching it, though? I don’t recall that, and wouldn’t want to guess at their use for it unless we saw them actively engaging with it. The only time I remember either doing so is when Harold turns it on to cover Church Mouse’s screams – literally blocking out the noise, and certainly available commentary on how some people use religion; set’s never turned off, so it’s still running when Maxine comes into the house at the end, and when the cops are there for the framing scenes. Good little joke that this seems to be the only program on the only station in the area; certainly a prime market for the upcoming home video boom.

(The credits say there’s footage from Marjoe, which would certainly lend a pound of attitude toward religion, but I don’t know where that was. Maybe they digitally swapped Gortner with Preacher Daddy.)

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the film ends with a contrived revelation of "oh he's her father" knowingly reduces the complexity of the meditations on the elusive power of meaningful egocentricity, by making Maxine the star of the movie with winking artifice, tying up this bit of enigmatic frustration with an uncanny coincidence of tangibility... The reveal on the TV seems to indicate that Maxine did porn because her father was a minister and repressed her from actualizing agency, pure and simple, x=y. It's obviously not that clearcut, but West allows it to be that way for us,

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This all’s just twisting in the wind for me because… is Maxine’s motivation even in play at that point? She’s never pitched as a complicated character. She wants to be Lynda Carter famous. She (and we) are told she’s special, though evidence of that was lost on me. We never see her worried about her past. At the end, effectively, survival’s enough motivation that suddenly deciding she’s a puzzle to be solved, and one easily solved, just puts another underdeveloped toy in play.

If we’re mining ironies, there are at least a couple more provided by that reveal: Maxine wants to be famous, but she’s already the surprise guest star on the only show airing 24/7 on the only channel in all of Texas. And a more stinging one: Maxine’s “I will not accept a life I do not deserve” mantra has its origins in Preacher Daddy’s sermon; she hasn’t broken with her past as decidedly as she thinks she has. (And Daddy’s sermons may not be landing how he intended.)

[therewillbeblus]

I like that reading in your first spoilerbox (as I did your original post, forgot to mention that!)

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though regardless of 'how' the old couple is using the religion to block out the noise, the action seems to minimize the power of religion in the film, repurposing it as a tool for escape. The worth is dismissed sincerely by them, whereas conversely, religion is 'everything' to Maxine- having conditioned her entire existence (to your point, she even stole and refurbished meaning from the "I will not accept a life I do not deserve" line). She's empowering herself from it, also minimizing its worth- though to some degree it’s a part of her history and inescapable, so such a dismissal isn’t entirely sincere- it’s engaging in denial, distraction, sublimation that ignores the suffering inside.

Which brings me to your second spoilerbox: There's a wonderful irony in how we can view Pearl vs. Maxine along the binary roots of artificiality vs authenticity, and that ironic relationship with superficiality. Maxine is authentically engaging in sexual activity on a superficial level, where she can literally physically access it with those who want to access it with her, while Pearl's need to inauthentically force sexual encounters without consent is artificial but honest within the internal logic of her deep-seated physiological, emotional, and philosophical needs. On the other hand, Maxine's relationship to sex, liberation, etc. feels shallow and artificial- she's shooting pornography, engaging in sex for profits and stardom rather than pleasure, which seems to be born from a reactionary vitriol to escape from her father... yet Pearl, for all her artificial methodologies to craft "intimacy," actually yearns for this on a deep, authentic level.

To your last point, I wonder if the message is that we are not worthy of being 'complicated' or viewed as 'special' until we reach a point of life where we have earned that multidimensional empathy through suffering. Only once we have an indication that Maxine has a backstory involving suffering from a broken home are we introduced to an inkling of her complexity- which is maybe deliberately dropped as an underdeveloped toy, because Pearl's entire lifetime of pain has actually deserved the film's attention, magnetized away from conventional genre beats against the friction of expectations.

Giving us this piece of information and then ending with Maxine moving onto a new chapter of her life, chanting that she deserves something with a narrow-focus and fiery agency, is another ironic contradiction. She is going to move on to live new shades of an existence that will one day inevitably reach a humility (“you can’t stop what’s coming,” to quote a wise old man from a Cormac adaptation) through the loss Pearl as experienced to make her deserve the spotlight of empathy; but her repetitive mantra is both empowering and delusional, denying obstacles standing in her way but also denying an admission of trauma or vulnerability that could unlock humility and recognize her authentic identity.

I think there's a more twisted aspect to the denouement: West can authenticate and forge empathy for Pearl via the power of the movies, but outside of this vehicle, Pearl's value is not worthy of our sympathies: we are grossed out by old people (the sex scene presents a mirror to the audience and forces us to sit with our intrinsic disgust thereby validating Pearl's devastating self-concept), her behavior is immoral and regardless of her tragic reasons, she's ultimately reduced to a carbon-copy villainess and her brain- the place where all these valuable, complex emotional surges and existential pain is swimming around- is crushed in an instant of genre-induced catharsis... Maxine is celebrated but her character is vacuous of authentic personality.

Are we rooting for the wrong character? Or is West playing with us, acknowledging that we are ultimately attracted to superficial elements over depth when we see movies (certainly like this one!) and, in contrast to how we gawked at the only bit of earnest lovemaking in the film, we hail the young, attractive woman regardless of her moral or character development being earned? By inserting this throwaway bit of info at the end paying lip service to her 'characterization', is West holding up another mirror to us that asks us to acknowledge this- “explaining” her psychology in a manner that is impossible to ignore its slight and cheap nature, and thus recognize our own attraction to shallow release by presenting it as faux-deliverance?

[brundlefly]

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conversely, religion is 'everything' to Maxine- having conditioned her entire existence (to your point, she even stole and refurbished meaning from the "I will not accept a life I do not deserve" line). She's empowering herself from it, also minimizing its worth- though to some degree it’s a part of her history and inescapable, so such a dismissal isn’t entirely sincere- it’s engaging in denial, distraction, sublimation that ignores the suffering inside.

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I mean… we can say she’s haunted by religion the whole time, she’s using the cocaine to push Jesus from her brain, etc. Which makes her sudden outburst at the end – as she’s driving away, scoffing at the hilarious “divine intervention!” shotgun kickback, she says, “I hate the Lord” – the first real look at her mental state.

The only presence religion has in the film other than Preacher Daddy is Church Mouse – whom Maxine does not like from the start, is disturbed by her stares… and maybe that’s because she feels like Jesus is watching. West devotes full frame to the shot of CM’s crucifix coming off before she films her sex scene (though I have to think he thinks the real transgression is behind-the-camera talent abdicating their duties; for shame, no one’s left alive to loop the grunts and groans).

At the climax she’s simultaneously faced with the blaring voice of her father and an accusatory outburst by CM (whom she just rescued!), so it could make sense her last thoughts land on, “I hate the Lord.”

…except that between that climax and that renunciation, West shoves in a back-and-forth (and a drive-and-reverse) between Maxine and Pearl that interrupts that line of thinking. I lose faith there’s grand design at work when focus is so scattershot and potential deeper meanings are so poorly articulated they lead to extracurricular dot-connecting.

Well-drawn religious conflict would have been easier had Church Mouse been the typical pearl-clutching stereotype, and I’m thrilled that she is not. (Also happy he cast Ortega, so good in The Fallout she convinced some people that movie wasn’t an Afterschool Special.)

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I wonder if the message is that we are not worthy of being 'complicated' or viewed as 'special' until we reach a point of life where we have earned that multidimensional empathy through suffering.

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Eh, even Pearl calls Maxine “special” – though you could cynically say that’s one actor’s self-affirmation. I think the only message to the audience was a practical one: This is going to be our Final Girl. A bit of clarification to maintain focus among a strong ensemble with showier performances and no standard bearer of virginal morality.

As to the rest… I think West’s great accomplishment here is generating sympathy for all these potentially unsavory characters regardless of victim status. One of the things I liked best about the film, and would hate to have to sacrifice for a stronger sense of purpose, is that it can be – as you pointed out up there – a hang-out picture. Casual chats and cadenzas like Pearl’s dance and “Landslide” are time well spent, though they bang the piece out of shape. Getting to hang out with the killer couple in the second half is great; perhaps a lesson learned from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the family is terrifying and cruel to everyone and each other but is also pathetic and in the end can be appreciated as a family – but by the time we do that in TCM we’ve already mowed through most of the cast.

No one dies for half this movie, and then, because we’ve come to enjoy most everyone’s company and there’s no crime-punishment agenda here, we don’t want to see anyone casually dispatched. Jason got to shish-kebab horny teens two at a go; we have to march Jackson all the way around a lake and back to no end but his own. Those deaths take time away from better knowing Maxine and Pearl and drawing parallels/conflicts, so that they couldn’t be fashioned into a clear, coherent path toward meaning is a real shame and, I’m just repeating myself now, a fundamental failure of a film loaded with provocative elements. I appreciate turning its aspects over and over, but am not convinced you can shake all its pieces into place.

[therewillbeblus]

Well I don't think you can (or should be able to) "shake all its pieces into place" either, but I do think West is presenting some opportunities within a knowingly cookie-cutter tribute to prompt us to twist or transpose its ideas, and so I'm merely venturing in those directions rather than assuming they're uniformly "true" or the intentions of the filmmakers to go that far.

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As for Pearl's assessment of Maxine as "special"- it's certainly operating within the self-reflexive format of labeling Maxine as special or the final girl, but I also think it mirrors well as a cheeky dismissal in how empty that word is: Such an affirmation could also be fueled through Pearl's sexual attraction to Maxine. She's special as an object to Pearl, perhaps as she was special as an object to her father, and she's special as an object within the 'film industry', a commodity to make money, an attractive person to have sex with, to date, to know. The idea of being "special" is thin and superficial every time it's discussed here- fitting for this kind of horror film- though all people who use the word crave a depth of connotation to that signifier that isn't felt quite as strongly in the works this is imitating. Pearl feels this depth, as does Maxine, but neither is able to actualize it- and that marks a tragedy of sorts, though Maxine seems to be comfortable resting in that superficial world because it invites her (in a way, it's meeting life on life's terms) while Pearl can no longer do so. She's not invited, and through that exclusion we're invited into her suffering. It's funny to think of the "gift of desperation" warranting murder as wrapped up with a spiritual experience it typically yields- one Pearl is no doubt getting here! It's not religious per se, but there is a clearly-defined release Pearl gets from her murder which inversely sublimates her sexual id drive into aggression, and that's meditated on in the aftermath of the first murder setpiece in a manner that I think incites a spiritual reading.

[Finch]

Did anyone else notice the missing persons poster printed on the back of the milk (or fruit juice?) package as Jackson was drinking it, right before he joins Howard on the search?

I liked the film a great deal and also found the opening shot very satisfying. I'm honestly undecided on the final twist; it didn't ruin the film for me but I'm also not convinced that it added all that much. The actor playing Wayne kept reminding me of Matthew McConaughey!

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah I thought that was pretty deliberately placed for us to notice

[Kracker]

incidentally the movie takes place in 1979, the year they started putting the missing kids on the milk cartons.

[brundlefly]

incidentally the movie takes place in 1979, the year they started putting the missing kids on the milk cartons.

Looks to be an anachronism; while Etan Patz, who may have been the first child to be part of a national milk carton campaign, disappeared in 1979, that campaign didn't start until at least 1984. It emulated a practice started that year in Iowa.

[cantinflas]

[DarkImbecile]

Trailer for Pearl

[black&huge]

I am fucking impressed

[The Curious Sofa]

This looks like it could be campy horror fun and it's good to see Mia Goth finally getting lead roles, here she gives off Shelley Duvall vibes more than ever. I enjoyed X but wasn't keen on the distracting old-age make-up, which at least is paying off now.

[therewillbeblus]

Pearl is coming to theatres in two weeks (Sept 16)

[Monterey Jack]

...and X just dropped to $13.99 on Amazon, so ideal for a double-feature!