XX || movie review

On its opening night the international film festival Stranger With My Face premiered the long awaited all-female anthology XX (2017) in Hobart’s very own Peacock Theatre. The four-part collection hosts a wide range of talent, director and producer Roxanne Benjamin (South Bound, The Guest), who spoke during the event, directs Don’t Fall; Karyn Kusama (The Invitation, Jennifer’s Body) directs Her Only living Son; Jovanka Vuckovic (The Captured Bird) directs The Box; and Annie Clark (St. Vincent) made her directorial debut with The Birthday Party. The stunning artistry of award-winning animator Sofia Carrillo (La Casa Triste, Black Doll, Out of Control, The Tailor’s Heart) connects the four stories of the film, which features actresses including Natalie Brown, Melanie Lynskey, Breeda Wool and Christina Kirk as main protagonists. XX is an introduction into the new age of female-directed horror, an experience you wouldn’t want to miss discovering.

XX’s first segment The Box is adapted from Jack Ketchum’s original story and directed by Jovanka Vuckovic, which concentrates on Susan Jacobs (Natalie Brown), a detached and lethargic mother, and her family; husband Robert Jacobs (Jonathan Watton), older daughter Jenny Jacobs (Peyton Kennedy), and young son Danny Jacobs (Peter DaCunha). It begins with Danny asking a strange man (Michael Dyson) to look inside the present box he’s holding, it is unknown to the audience what he saw but his personality and the atmosphere of the film drastically changes afterwards. Throughout the film Danny refuses to eat, which eventually concerns his father but is ignored by his mother until they have to see a doctor (Ron Lea). Danny avoids his parent’s questions but decides to confide in his sister, who starts to lose her appetite as well. While Susan seems adamant that the situation isn’t seriously her husband finally snaps and pleads with their son to tell him what’s wrong. When Danny admits what he saw his father loses his own appetite as a result and Susan is forced to consider the problem. It's a film that uses camera angles to its advantage to display its themes in a clever and meticulous way.

XX’s second segment The Birthday Party, co-written with Roxanne Benjamin and directed by Annie Clark (St. Vincent), through excellent music score, wonderful acting and clever dialogue incorporates both horror and humour into its story, concepts that are seen as “two-sides of the same coin” by Roxanne Benjamin. Mary (Melanie Lynskey), an anxious and meticulous mother, is organising her young daughter’s birthday party (Sanai Victoria) when she discovers that her husband David (Seth Duhame) has died in his office from an intentional overdose. Lynskey’s inherent sense of humour works surprisingly well with the story’s gruesome premise as Mary tries to delay the horrible truth for as long as possible by dodging her daughter, Carla the nanny (Sheila Vand) and even her neighbour Madeleine (Lindsay Burdge) all while struggling to drag around and hide her husband's corpse throughout the house in a classically comical Lynskey style (e.g. Two and a Half Men).

XX’s third segment Don’t Fall, written and directed by Roxanne Benjamin, focuses on Gretchen (Breeda Wool), a young and thoughtful woman who unwittingly trespasses on a protected reservation with her carefree brother Paul (Casey Adams), fun-loving girlfriend Jess (Angela Trimbur) and knowledgeable friend Jay (Morgan Krantz) while going camping. On a hike, the group finds a prehistoric cave painting, that looks to be drawn in blood, of three figures with one having visible horns. Back at their campsite Gretchen attempts to avoid her brother’s practical jokes by turning in early but wakes up to find herself back at the cave wall painting. Gretchen then sees the looming, horned figure from the painting nearing towards her and she begins to transform, as her friends will soon discover. Benjamin states that the film was shot in three days and was surprised that audiences initially didn’t realise that the protagonist Gretchen was in a relationship with Jess, revelling in the film’s nonchalant showcase of an LGBT couple. Benjamin also discusses the design of the monster that Gretchen is eventually turned into and how it was modelled after the place the film was set in, the physical features intended to mirror that of the desert with cracked and bony skin.

XX’s fourth and final segment Her Only Living Son, written and directed by Karyn Kusama, centres on Cora (Christina Kirk), a woman who receives enough money from a Doctor (Curt Cornelius) in order to go into hiding with her infant son from the child’s father. Throughout the story it is insinuated that Cora, who is a very religious woman, has somehow conceived a child with the devil and is continuously being pursued by his followers, including the mailman Chet (Mike Doyle), Principal Jenks (Brenda Wehle), and the teacher Mr. Dayton (Morgan Peter Brown), who warn her that soon the child with reunite with his father. As her son Andy (Kyle Allen) nears his eighteenth birthday Cora begins to notice the signs that may suggest there is something wrong with her son (e.g. Andy’s cruelty toward animals and other children). The story does have the underlying messages of teenage angst, single motherhood and broken families with the metaphor of the father figure being the literal devil that is trying to take her son away after she has done all of the heavy lifting of raising the child by herself.

Nearly all of the stories centred around motherhood, with the exclusion of Don’t Fall, but all of them were connected through the theme of family and that a family can be many different things, whether it be the conventional mother/father/children family, the smaller brother/sister family or the broken single-mother/son family. Additionally, every story begins and is focused on a female protagonist (e.g. Susan, Mary, Gretchen, Cora), Benjamin declaring that this was the only mandate for the collection and that the creators had free rein over everything else. She went on to say that even though there are so many of them the percentage of female directors in the horror genre of the film industry steadily decreases as budgets for films gets higher, and that the number had actually dropped since 2016. Witnessing this strong network of men and women who avidly support this style and genre last night really cemented the sense of wonder that I felt of the phenomenon that is this niche community of people.