Spooktober II Review #13 - XX

XX (2017)
Roxanne Benjamin, Karyn Kusama, St. Vincent, Jovanka Vuckovic

I finally got around to seeing XX, which I've meant to watch for a while now. If you don't know, it's a horror anthology film of four vignettes all written and directed by female filmmakers and starring female leads. This makes only the third Spooktober II film directed by a woman, but already the second from 2017. I wonder what happened in 2017 that inspired female directors to think about horror...

Horror anthologies can be a fun departure from the standard 90 minute narrative, although they usually end up being a little uneven. Think of it this way: if you randomly select 3 random Twilight Zone episodes, you're bound to get one great one, one ok one, and a clunker (like that one about Zither music). It's rare to find an anthology movie where all the vignettes are strong (it might just be Creepshow), and XX is no exception. Still, the good stuff is definitely worth watching.

XX feels like a film made under certain constraints. I'm not sure about the background, and Wikipedia was no help, but I assume that female filmmakers were assembled to create four short films that would eventually be laced together with time and budget limitations. I don't sense that they cooperated or tried to develop a common theme, and the interstitials have nothing to do with the plot of any of the vignettes. It's cool that each director was given free rein to come up with whatever they wanted to, and so a lot of personality bleeds through.

There's no way to describe the whole film at once, so I'll break it down part by part:

Interstitials - A lot of creepy and beautiful looking nonsense. It's a spooky house filled with old gothic dolls and toys that are seemingly alive and moving about. The animation is great, and it feels like a more coherent and less flashy intro to American Horror Story. There's a particularly good time lapse sequence with a rotting apple being devoured by flies.

The Box - This story begins with a mother and her children riding a train into a city around Christmastime. Her son becomes curious with the bright red package that a mysterious looking man on the train is holding in his lap, and the boy asks to see what's inside. The man obliges. From this moment on, the boy stops eating altogether, and never explains why. Eventually he tells his sister and father about what he saw in the box, and they also stop eating. It's a complete and bizarre mystery, especially since their personalities don't seem to change on any profound level. It's like the horror movie version of the music video for Just:

Whatever was inside the box, it seems to have an existential effect on everybody who knows about it. As the boy is wasting away, and is told by a doctor that he has to eat or he'll die, the boy responds, "So what?" 

At one point, while her family is starving to death around her, the mother dreams that she is lying on the family dinner table, with the meat on her legs cleaned away to the bone. Her husband is carving another large chunk of her flesh off and feeds it to the children, who eat hungrily. The camera cuts back to her face, and she's smiling. She'd love to be able to finally nourish her family, both physically and emotionally. It's the best cinematography and scene in the entire film.

There's also some real solid camera work with the meals that the family prepares, and I like that the traditional horror gender roles are flipped. 

Not a bad way to start.

The Birthday Party - This vignette was put together by musician and artist St. Vincent (under her birth name), who is on record as saying she hates horror movies. This makes perfect sense, because this vignette is not what you'd call scary. It is the best of the four sections, however!

This story is pretty simple: a wealthy mother is putting together her young daughter's birthday party while also dealing with her snippy housekeeper and the freshly discovered corpse of her husband. There's little exposition, other than he is rich, and supposed to be out of town. When the woman finds her husband slouched over in his office chair, she doesn't want the party to be ruined so she immediately tries to hide the body. Her efforts range from "somewhat sensible" to full blown Weekend at Bernies 2. The payoff at the end of the segment is particularly funny, although the text St. Vincent added after the fade-to-black was completely unnecessary and felt like her over-explaining the joke.

My favorite part of this vignette was the Lynchian absurdity to the little details. When the children arrive for the party, they're dressed in the most bizarre costumes. One is a giant toilet, another is just a random shape, and the birthday girl is wearing an opaque shower curtain with eye holes cut out. Their parents look like they walked straight out of Pleasantville. And all of the party favors are either black, white, or gray. In fact, they look exactly like the decorations that Dwight uses in The Office when he's the head of the party planning committee:

It's a darkly comic entry, and I think it really works as a 20 minute short film.

Don't Fall - I have exactly two notes written down for this one: "rock paintings" and "turns into monster." That's all I took out of this one. Here's literally everything that happens: four young people go hiking, they find some crude paintings on a boulder, one of them turns into a horrible monster, and she kills her friends. The end.

It was boring and it sucked.

Her Only Living Son - This is more like it. To close out the film, we get the second best vignette, and probably the only one that could be improved if it were turned into a feature length film. It's the story of a single mom and her soon-to-be 18 year old son. Things are not happy in the household, however, as the boy (Andy) constantly disobeys his mother (Cora). It's not just that he is a discipline problem at home and school, he's also doing sadistic and sociopathic things like torturing animals. 

Cora has to go to a meeting at Andy's school because he ripped out the fingernails of a classmate, with seemingly no explanation. The other child's mother is justifiably furious, but the school officials tell her that there will be no punishment for Andy. Even as Cora pleads for the school to punish her son, the principal assures her that they would never dream of doing anything to displease Andy, for he is a "prodigy." Their response is very cult-like. 

More and more people seem to know who Andy is and tell Cora that he's so special. Even the mailman shows up one day to profess his undying love for Andy.

This segment feels like a really well-made fan film about what happened after the end of Rosemary's Baby. If Rosemary had taken her child underground, and moved from town to town, this would be their life as he came of age. It also reminded me of the Rick and Morty episode "Raising Gazorpazorp," where Morty has a child that is half human, and half violent monster. 

The ending is a little tacked on and is basically a less funny version of this:

There's a lot more that could have been done with the final segment, so it comes off half-baked. But there's a strong kernel there that should have been adopted into a longer, more robust section. A lot of anthology movies have a few 20 minute sections, and a longer 30-40 minute section, so this tells me the filmmakers were given some sort of time constraint.

Summary:

XX is a cool experimental film. There's a lot of personality to the vignettes, and a couple really stand out. It's also good to see something made by female filmmakers early on in their careers, and hopefully there's more like this to come. It's on Netflix and is under 90 minutes, plus if you fast forward through Don't Fall, it's basically just an hour. Well worth it.