Director: Ti West
Cast: Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Kevin Bacon
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Finally managed to catch a new release on opening weekend. What a luxury. It was appended to an all-night marathon with a series of other films with similar settings and themes. I had the ambition to make it the whole night, but you can imagine how that went.
Did I Like It: I had a little trepidation going into this. I’ve seen X (2022) but haven’t gotten around to watching Pearl (2022), and I figured I would be more than a little lost. Thankfully, you dear reader will really only need X to follow what is going on. Pearl—the villain of the first film—is an incidental presence in the film, which only makes me worried that Pearl is something of an incidental film, but that’s an issue for another review.
Where X was a straight-ahead (if well-crafted) slasher, this trucks in a lot of the same trappings of a slasher film, but ends up being a fairly serviceable mystery as well. You might be saying to yourself that such a description doesn’t really distinguish itself from Scream (1996) or any of its sequels. But there’s an undercurrent of tension in this film that I really think sells the possibility that Maxine herself is the killer, and makes that possible ending not a complete betrayal of everything that has happened before. That uncertainty alone makes the film worth a watch.
I won’t spoil what is happening in the film here, but it certainly helps matters that by the end of the film anyone who survives is not going to have any degree of innocence. Everyone has blood on their hands, and almost none of that blood owes itself to madness, but instead to ambition, ruthlessness, and a reflexive, compulsive desire to keep things “the way they ought to be.” This is Hollywood, after all.