X review: Mia Goth, Kid Cudi, and Jenna Ortega stumble into expertly wrought backwoods terror

Traipsing into danger is the essential playbook of horror, a path well-trodden. But the brutal, giddy-making X, written and directed by Ti West, makes that journey somehow feel both fresh and comfortingly familiar. That dichotomy is at the heart of West's style, honed over years of indie horror filmmaking (and lately, an impressive amount of episodic TV). His features come clad in impeccable retro stylings: The House of the Devil from 2009 was the feathered-hair, Fixx-soundtracked '80s babysitter thriller you didn't know you needed.

But that fondness for details arrives with a sly sense of interrogation. You wouldn't call it "elevated horror" — God forbid — so much as exfoliated. West loves a good splattery kill and an off-putting stare, and if the house in the middle of the rural wilderness ain't broke, he isn't going to fix it.

Christopher Moss/A24 Mia Goth 'X'

West also clearly has a fondness for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper's revolutionary 1974 landmark, a film that X, set only five years later, explicitly echoes to an uncanny degree — and also revises. (Pay no attention to that official sequel that came and went a few weeks ago.) You can feel it in X's oppressive sense of fly-buzzed heat, or observe it in the movie's perfectly re-created lean-to gas station (no sizzling barbecue this time) or the way a zoom lens follows a van creeping up to a spooky farmhouse.

In the van are six porn makers — porn stars is definitely pushing it. Maxine (Mia Goth), Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), and Jackson (Scott Mescudi, a.k.a Kid Cudi) are the onscreen talent; all three of the actors nail that sweaty Boogie Nights desperation. Wayne (Martin Henderson), their ringleader praying for a Debbie Does Dallas he can call his own, has dollar signs in his eyes. His cinematographer, R.J. (Owen Campbell), meanwhile, has convinced himself he's making an art film. As for R.J.'s girlfriend, Lorraine (former Disney kid Jenna Ortega), holding the boom pole? She's a little undecided about what side of the lens she wants to be on.

Christopher Moss/A24 'X'

Even though they're headed out of Houston to get some privacy to make their magnum opus, The Farmer's Daughters, we already know that they're not alone. Yet before blood is spilled — and West does savor his slow build — there's another dynamic at play: a shifting power struggle about seeing and being seen, and occasionally just as brutal. The sexual battle tactics are refreshing given what usually passes for horror, and when X does burst into violence, they somehow continue, with icky scenes that pit longing against envy and destruction.

Revealing the identities of the killers would be unsporting (let's hint that those recent full-body transformations of Jared Leto and Colin Farrell are becoming a thing). For its whole running time, X has ideas on its mind. Like the doubled-edged title itself, both an evocation of the grungy rating this movie might have received in 1979 and something more suggestive ("You've got that X factor," Wayne says of Maxine's allure), it indicates a film that feels unpinned, ominous, and potentially unforgettable. Grade: A-

Related content:

• Director Ti West on the locations of X, his grungy homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

• An adult film shoot goes terrifyingly wrong in trailer for horror movie X

• Scream star Jenna Ortega says the script for SXSW horror film X was 'the most outrageous thing I'd ever read'

• Suspiria and X star Mia Goth on her work in horror films