Directed by Battle Royale’s Kenta Fukasaku with a screenplay from Blade of the Immortal screenwriter Tetsuya Oishi, X-Cross tells the sensitive story of two best friends, Shiyori (Nao Matsushita) and Aiko (Ami Suzuki). Reeling from her first major breakup, Shiyori agrees to skip town with the more worldly Aiko to spend the weekend at a secluded hot spring resort. Unfortunately, this particular onsen is located in Ashikari, a remote village where twisted “scarecrows” dot the skyline, thick mist hangs in the valley, and – perhaps most disconcertingly – there don’t appear to be any other women.
After a heated argument, Shiyori and Aiko separate, and the other shoe drops: the village is home to a violent cult that ritualistically amputates and imprisons women, worshiping them as living gods. Armed with bedazzled flip-phones and the power of friendship, Shiyori and Aiko must reunite to escape the cult and discover who lured them to the village in the first place.
Despite its seductively batshit premise, X-Cross remains underseen and underappreciated in the West, even amongst die-hard horror aficionados.
On Letterboxd, X-Cross has been logged nearly as many times as it's been added to lists (a ratio reserved for very, very special genre gems). X-Cross only has one critical entry on Rotten Tomatoes: a Blu-ray review published a decade after the film’s Japanese theatrical release in 2007. X-Cross isn’t invisible. But, as a Westerner, the stars need to align for it to make it to your watchlist.
Sure enough, familiar culprits explain X-Cross’s relative obscurity. In the mid-noughties, discovering – let alone finding subtitled copies of – foreign genre films was a wild goose chase. A decent physical release of X-Cross wasn’t properly available in North America until the end of 2011, by which point the streaming wars were in full effect and physical media rental had all but vanished. Thankfully, in 2021, the heroic weebs over at Media Blasters released a much-improved Blu-ray, at which point X-Cross began appearing on a handful of foreign-film-friendly streaming services.
While admittedly niche, it feels like X-Cross has yet to find its equally niche audience. This is a shame, because when I first heard about X-Cross (on a since-nuked foreign horror film forum), I was damn near ready to learn Japanese if I couldn’t get my hands on a subtitled copy. Here’s what hooked me: X-Cross is the closest a film has ever come to capturing the vibe of a PS2-era survival horror video game.
“But Meg!” “How can you say that?” “We’ve had straight-up big-budget film adaptations of Resident Evil and Silent Hill!” “Aren’t those the big survival horror games from that console era?”
That’s true, imaginary enemy I made up in my head. But I’d argue that, in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, these Western adaptations often sacrifice the weirder elements that made their source material so special in the first place.
For its part, X-Cross doesn’t appear to be interested in being palatable. And thank god, because the film’s whole, weird-ass deal is precisely what makes it feel so much like a retro survival horror game.
Halfway through X-Cross, we fully switch character perspectives from the timid Shiyori to the feisty Aiko, resulting in two compartmentalized storylines that parallel in cute, surprising, and often lore-relevant ways. Multiple playable characters were a popular feature of early survival horror (see: Kuon, Alone in the Dark, and most early Resident Evil entries). As such, X-Cross’s decision to spring this switch on us, rather than simply cross-cutting between Shiyori and Aiko, makes things feel especially video-gamey. It’s as though we’re starting a new game, selecting Aiko, and whoops! It turns out the reason she was acting so weird was because she was being hounded by a jilted maniac in a lolita outfit. Speaking of which …
Reika (Maju Ozawa) is what you’d get if you put Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head and Haunting Ground’s Daniella in a blender with platform boots and lace. She is a classic stalker-enemy of the Resident Evil 3: Nemesis variety; an overpowered, relentless presence that forces you to run, hide, and cower in that order. That is, until the game sarcastically chucks a railgun your way (or, in Aiko’s case, a chainsaw). Reika even wields a pair of comically oversized scissors, which always, no matter the occasion, are a reference to Clock Tower’s appropriately-named Scissorman.
Less in-your-face connective tissue exists, too. The visual clash of Shiyori and Aiko’s iconic modern outfits and their drab, traditional surroundings is reminiscent of low-poly survival horror character design. And with her lack of coordination, Shiyori (god bless her) might as well be piloted by tank controls. Luckily, all of the villagers – who look and act a lot like the shibito from the Siren series – are hilariously slow. This is justified with some delightfully convenient worldbuilding about the villagers that feels straight out of an old-school Konami manual. Then again, slow as their pursuers may be, both girls have the perceptive skills of someone intentionally driving their Pontiac Ventura into the clearly haunted Silent Hill. So the gameplay is balanced, as it were.
Even the presence of cellphones as a critical source of plot development (so-and-so isn’t what they seem!!) and objectives (go to the public bathroom!!) feels auspicious. The Fatal Frame fan in me was especially excited when Aiko’s camera phone was repurposed as a weapon in the film’s climax (which itself couldn’t be more of a final boss arena). Then again, Aiko clearly went to the Resident Evil school of “combining items into better items,” so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at her resourcefulness. Aiko rules.
As I’m sure you’ve guessed, X-Cross is completely bonkers. It’s girly-pop, over-the-top folk horror that ends with an Aly & AJ needle drop. And if you give me enough beer, I’ll even argue that it’s queer-coded. I don’t think it’s a mystery as to why X-Cross isn’t as well known as the likes of Exte or Tokyo Gore Police. Nevertheless, it is a minor tragedy that it has yet to receive the flowers it clearly deserves. If you’re a fan of ridiculous old-school survival horror games like Silent Hill, you owe it to yourself to watch X-Cross. The cult always needs more members.
