Ti West is an incredibly astute visual director, and with X, he continues to show this. He turns this farmhouse into one of the most hellish nightmares imaginable, where there is no place that is truly safe. That being said, West has never impressed me with his writing before. His earlier films have very little detail put into the characters and themes-they're all concept and little substance. Thankfully that's changed with this one. This is probably West's most character-filled film. Every single character in this story is incredibly flawed, yet still retains a shred of sympathetic humanity. The protagonists live too much in the moment with no regard for future consequences, while the film's villains yearn for a bygone era of their lives and harbor envy toward those who have what they have lost. Each group represents an untenable human desire, and it adds a layer of melancholy to the terror that unfolds. It's not a perfect film; like pretty much all slasher films, there are some characters who exist just to get killed off in predictable fashion, and some death scenes come off as rather anticlimactic. Additionally, because every character kind of sucks as a person, there's a two-edged sword in that none of them are particularly likeable and I didn't get attached to them in the way I think West wanted me to. Still, this is quite a wild, effectively uncomfortable ride, and a far smarter one than I was expecting.

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