In Review: 'X,' 'Deep Water,' 'The Outfit'

In a weekend of throwbacks, Ti West does a twist on 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,' Adrian Lyne brings sexy back after a two-decade absence and 'The Outfit' luxuriates in gangster style.

X
Dir. Ti West
108 min.

Maxine (Mia Goth) works days at a strip club cradled between factories and refineries on the outskirts of Houston, , but she has dreams of getting out. Those dreams, however, might not take her very far. As X opens she’s made plans to star in a porno movie produced by her boyfriend (and the owner of the strip club) Wayne (Martin Henderson), an easygoing fellow with a McConaughey drawl who figures if anyone can make a dirty movie, why can’t he? It’s 1979, porn still enjoying a boom period, and he figures all he needs to make a rural sex romp called The Farmer’s Daughters are Maxine, a couple of co-stars (Brittany Snow and Scott Mescudi, elsewhere known as Kid  Cudi), a two-person film crew pledged to uphold “the spirit of independent cinema” (Owen Campbell and Jenna Ortega), and a middle-of-nowhere farm he can rent on the cheap. What could go wrong?

Unsurprisingly, a lot. A new horror film directed by Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers), X pays homage to an era when grindhouse cheapies doubled as social documents for an America daring to loosen up, let its hair down, and get funky. Parts of it, anyway. Maxine, Wayne and their companions might have gotten swept up in the moment, but they keep encountering an undercurrent of resistance, whether it’s the TV preacher droning on about the evils of sex who soundtracks their visit to a gas station or the aged Harold (Stephen Ure, under a lot of prosthetics), the owner of the farm, who disapproves of their general vibe even without knowing what they’re up to. Harold’s even more decrepit-looking wife Pearl, however, seems pretty curious. (You can go to the IMDb to see who plays her, but it’s really more fun to let the closing credits have the reveal).

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West didn’t choose X’s end-of-the-’70s setting just for the disco fashions and Lynda Carter references. Though Wayne expresses enthusiasm for the coming home video market he knows will soon make porn available beyond the market of “perverts,” he can’t know what we know: that the Moral Majority, Reagan, AIDS, and other factors will soon sweep in to remake the country. But X mostly pushes that element deep into the subtext of a grisly, well-executed shocker that dispatches its cast with brutal efficiency over the course of one horrible night on the farm.

X pays explicit homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (and director Tobe Hooper’s lesser-known follow-up, Eaten Alive) while drawing from a deep well of low-budget horror killfests (and offering at least one nod to Boogie Nights). That knowingness can, in the early stretches, make X feel like a horror movie in quotation marks, but West’s technical skills eventually make them disappear. There’s an eerie, awful beauty, for instance, to a quiet scene in which Maxine lingers on the edge of a lake, unaware of the figure watching from a distance whose unkempt silver hair West frames like a menacing halo. And once the killings begin in earnest X becomes as gripping as it is uncomfortable, offering jolts born of genuine surprise and revulsion where other films might settle for jump scares. Opening in the aftermath of a mass murder before flashing back, it’s clear from the start that Wayne and his crew will encounter some, um, production woes while shooting The Farmer’s Daughters, but X makes the journey to that inevitable end a dark delight. —Keith Phipps

Deep Water
Dir. Adrian Lyne 
115 min.

There’s no getting around the fact that Deep Water, director Adrian Lyne’s first film in 20 years, is an absolutely ludicrous thriller, with a pile-up of dead and missing persons that reaches critical mass in the bugnuts third act. But it’s only in that third act that it feels at all like a thriller—and even then, in the final moments, it circles back to the knotty psychodrama it has been for most of its running time. Though based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, and directed by the man who gave us Fatal Attraction and 9 ½ Weeks, Deep Water plays like a sexy, macabre Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, an intense dialogue between an unhappily married couple that’s occasionally disrupted by outsiders. The difference is that rather than slain by boozy one-liners the outsiders here are (perhaps) literally slain.

Lyne’s disappearance from the movies has been its own mystery, especially since his last work, 2002’s Unfaithful, was warmly regarded as a skillful erotic thriller and an especially fine showcase for Diane Lane. The obvious answer is that Hollywood was the culprit: A studio system that once thrived on glossy, seductive Lyne teases like Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks, and Fatal Attraction had simply stopped producing the steamy adult titles that he reliably turned into water-cooler hits. That Deep Water, a long-delayed 20th Century Studios project, has been relegated to a streaming premiere on Hulu might seem a testament to the film’s flaws, but even if Lyne had executed it perfectly, it would feel conspicuously out of step with the times. And that’s mostly a compliment. 

Set in the unnamed town in the Bayou, Deep Water stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as Vic and Melinda Van Allen, a couple that could be said to have an open relationship, but they haven’t formally agreed to terms. They remain married, perhaps for the sake of their young daughter Trixie, though the child gravitates toward her father and her mother shows little patience for her. (When the kid tells Alexa to play “Old McDonald” for the umpteenth time, a hungover Melinda screams, “Alexa, stop! Don’t ever play that shit again!”) Indeed, the bond between them is a more compelling mystery than the deaths the police care little to investigate. They share strong feelings about each other. It’s just hard to describe them as love.

At a party early in the film, Melinda flirts brazenly with a handsome young man named Joel (Brendan C. Miller), including a slinky run on a piano that’s just short of what Michelle Pfeiffer pulled off in The Fabulous Baker Boys. Though he’s familiar with the rumors of a missing man that was once one of Melinda’s “friends,” Joel believes that Vic is cool with playing the cuckold—at least until he actually talks to Vic, who ominously tells him that the missing man “saw a lot of my wife.” For Vic, Melinda’s affairs are an endless game of whack-a-mole, with each new man triggering a seething jealousy that manifests as crimes of passion. When a local author (an excellent Tracy Letts) steps in with the suspicion that Vic is a murderer, the mayhem escalates. 

With barbed wit and a physical magnetism that defies rationality, Affleck and de Armas spark off each other, both verbally and non-, in exchanges that have the adults-only liveliness of Lyne at his best. Before Deep Water makes no sense as a thriller, it only seems to make no sense as a marriage story, with Melinda having affairs out in the open and Vic failing to bottle up his fury about it. Yet the rising body count could (and should) be understood as a manifestation of a private dynamic, of a couple penned in a stormy relationship that they care too much about to end. It’s just a shame the film is as messy as they are. — Scott Tobias

The Outfit
Dir. Graham Moore
Dir. 107 min.

Leonard (Mark Rylance) doesn’t get out much and doesn’t appear to mind. He seems perfectly satisfied running a bespoke men’s clothing shop located on an anonymous Chicago corner. Little annoys him, except maybe when people call him a tailor. (He’s a “cutter,” and didn’t train on Saville Row to be mistaken for a mere button mender.) His receptionist and sole employee Mable (Zoey Deutch) doesn’t offer much in the way of conversation, but doesn’t need to. He treats her with fatherly affection and she responds in kind. Even the low-life gangsters who use his back room as a drop box for messages don’t bother him much. Or at least they don’t seem to bother him. Leonard doesn’t talk much about his past. He sidetracks questions by saying he was driven out by the arrival of “blue jeans,” followed by a well-practiced laugh. He doesn’t say much about the present, either. But he has plans.

The Outfit marks the directorial debut of Graham Moore, a novelist best known in the film world for writing the script to The Imitation Game. Co-written with Jonathan McClain (a Chicagoan, like Moore), the film has modest aims and largely achieves them. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a bottle episode, never leaving Leonard’s small shop, which turns into a pressure cooker one night when two toughs—Richie (Dylan O’Brien), the son of a big underworld boss and Mabel’s boyfriend and Francis (Johnny Flynn)—take shelter there after clashing with a rival crew. Complicating matters, they know there’s a rat in their organization but don’t know who.

Working with Dick Pope, Mike Leigh’s regular director of photography, Moore makes the most of a tight location. Though the script isn’t exactly a Mamet-like work of clockwork precision, it effectively pushes the story along. It’s Deutch and Rylance that provide the best reasons to watch, however. The former continues her emergence as a reliable star with an ability to suggest her characters have rich inner lives. It probably doesn’t hurt that she’s playing opposite one of the best in the business at that particular skill. The story runs out of surprises before the movie’s through. Rylance doesn’t. — Keith Phipps

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