‘What’s in the box?’
Horror is the only genre that regularly embraces the anthology format with the V/H/S/ franchise as a prominent recent example. XX is an all-female horror anthology with the tagline “Four deadly tales by four killer women”. What we actually have here are two pretty good tales, one average tale and one forgettable tale. And now I’ve written the word ‘tale’ so much that it has lost all meaning…
XX features The Box directed by Jovanka Vuckovic, The Birthday Party from Annie Clark (known as St. Vincent in her musical career), Don’t Fall by Roxanne Benjamin and Karyn Kusama’s Her Only Living Son rounds things off.
The film starts off strong with The Box and its twisted tale (there it is again!) of cannibalism and starvation. It’s weird. It’s off-putting. It’s a successful horror story. The Birthday Party is the strongest entry for me with Clark going for black humour rather than out-and-out horror. The story concerns a woman (Melanie Lynskey) simultaneously attempting to hold a birthday party for her daughter whilst also struggling to hide the corpse of her dead husband. Lynskey elevates the material as she so often does and the whole thing builds to a frantic conclusion that has shades of Inside No. 9. Unfortunately, the final two stories about a camping trip gone wrong (Don’t Fall) and a spiritual sequel to Rosemary’s Baby (Her Only Living Son) are horror by numbers that don’t really bring anything new to the genre.
While the creation of a woman-only space to produce horror stories is an admirable and important concept, XX is only half a good film.
