The post-Millennial revival of the anthology horror film (the V/H/S series, the ABCs of Death films, Southbound (2015), Ghost Stories (2017)) offered a home for a quartet of female writer-directors in XX, four stories (five if we include the Jan Svankmajer-esque wraparound device directed by Sofia Carrillo) from directors with varying degrees of experience, not just in horror but in film-making in general. As with all anthologies it’s a hit and miss affair but even its worst stories are watchable enough and overall, it’s a worthy addition to a sub-genre of horror that extends back at least as far as Unheimliche Geschichten in 1919.

Carrillo’s wraparound sequences are among the creepiest, a disjointed stop-motion piece featuring a doll’s house – with a doll’s face – that moves around, eating bugs and collecting items it finds in a nursery. Eventually it finds a blackbird which it places in the body of a young girl it finds sleeping in an adjacent room via a door in her chest…

The first story, The Box, was written and directed by Jovanka Vuckovic (a former effects artist and editor of Rue Morgue magazine) and based on a short story by Jack Ketchum. Vuckovic had made a handful of shorts before starting on The Box (she went on to direct the feature Riot Girls in 2019) and gets the film proper off to a creepy start with this enigmatic tale of a chance meeting on a subway train that leads to incomprehensible tragedy. Returning home from a shopping trip with his mother Susan Jacobs (Natalie Brown) and sister Jenny (Peyton Kennedy), young Danny (Peter DaCunha) asks a fellow passenger (Michael Dyson) what’s in the red box he’s carrying. The man shows him (we never see what’s inside, nor do we ever find out later what was in there) and soon afterwards Danny starts refusing to eat. He whispers something to Jenny and she too starts to starve herself, followed shortly afterwards by dad Robert (Jonathan Watton). Susan is the only one unaffected and struggles to understand the strange events that are threatening to destroy her family.

The Box is an intriguing idea, nicely directed by Vuckovic and well-acted though some might find the story’s lack of resolution unsatisfying. For others it simply adds to the creepiness pf the tale – who was the man on the train? What was in the box? And why does it cause Danny to embark on such an extreme course of action? None of these questions are answered but one suspects that any resolution would have been disappointing anyway. Susan’s dream, of her being happily cannibalised by her starving family, is one of the film’s most unsettling images and the climax, as she watches her family deteriorate before her eyes, powerless to prevent the inevitable, is heart-breaking.

This strong start is slightly undermined by the second story, an original titled The Birthday Party, written by Roxanne Benjamin and Annie Clark and directed by Clark, better known as a musician under the pseudonym St Vincent. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it per se – again it’s nicely done, extremely well-acted by Heavenly Creatures (1994) and Two and Half Men (2003-2015) star Melanie Lynskey and provides some of the film’s best laughs but it feels out of place here. It’s not really a horror story, more of a grim black comedy that owes something to Weekend at Bernie’s (1989). Lynskey plays Mary who is organising a birthday party for her daughter Lucy (Sanai Victoria) when she finds that her husband David (Seth Duhame) has died in his home office. As the guests start to arrive, Mary frantically tries to keep David’s death from her daughter, eventually trying to hide it in a giant panda suit. But things inevitably don’t go to plan…

A final caption reveals the episode’s full title, The Birthday Party, or, The Memory Lucy Suppressed from Her Seventh Birthday That Wasn’t Really Her Mom’s Fault (Even Though Her Therapist Says It’s Probably Why She Fears Intimacy) which is unwieldy but surprisingly accurate. It’s certainly very funny but is it really horror? Probably not and how much you get from the vignette will depend largely on how much that matters to you. It feels like the proverbial sore thumb, sticking out noticeably from the rest of the stories which are, to varying degrees, far more traditional genre fare.

The most traditional of them all is story three, Don’t Fall, written and directed by Roxanne Benjamin, producer of the first two V/H/S/ films and writer-director of the Siren section of Southbound. Like the rest pf the stories, Don’t Fall is a perfectly well-crafted story, but it feels a little old hat, treading a path that had already been well trodden while bringing nothing new to the party.

A group of friends – Paul (Casey Adams), Gretchen (Breeda Wool), Jess (Angela Trimbur) and Jay (Morgan Krantz) – are on a camping holiday in the deep desert when they come across a cave adorned with ancient paintings on an evil spirit. During the night, the spirit possesses Gretchen who then goes on to make short work of her friends. And that’s all there is to it, a simple tale, one that’s all too familiar from other films. The awful CGI effects and annoying characters don’t do too much to help and it’s by far the weakest of the five stories.

The film ends on a high with Her Only Living Son, written and directed by the most experienced of the film’s creators, Karyn Kusama, previously director of Girlfight (2000), Æon Flux (2005) and Jennifer’s Body (2009). Though the ending feels a little rushed (despite this being the longest of the stories) and the story again owes something to former glories (it’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) by way of Servants of Twilight (1991), ending up as the film that the television movie Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976) should have been) it’s the film’s crowning glory.

Single mother Cora (Christina Kirk) is struggling with her increasingly wayward teenage son Andy (Kyle Allen). He’s recently torn the fingernails off a fellow high school pupil though the teachers seem to be going out of their way to protect him. Cora slowly comes to realise that there’s something very strange about her son, that he may be the devil’s offspring and that a conspiracy to protect him at all costs has managed to ensnare her without her realising it.

With its moving final statement from Cora about her right to motherhood, Her Only Living Son might be able to stake a claim for being the film’s most overt feminist statement, something curiously muted or missing completely from the other stories. Like Don’t Fall it explores familiar ground but does it with style to spare and is never less than utterly engrossing, thanks again to great performances and a clever script.

XX is little different in many respects to any of the anthology horror films that preceded it. It’s the proverbial curate’s egg, only good in parts, but it’s always entertaining even at its most mediocre. Perhaps the lack of a uniquely female perspective on most of the stories is a disappointment but then expecting women directors to fly the flag for feminism in every project they engage with is probably unreasonable and vaguely patronising in itself. XX does what it set out to do, to give a platform for five female writer-directors to show off what they could do and while the results are variable surely that itself was a noble enough ambition, one it mostly succeeds in achieving.