Watching Project X is like snorting cocaine while Superbad plays in the background. Is it good? Fuck, man, I don’t know. It’s a hell of an experience, though! That’s for sure.
Project X is a teen comedy. As someone who has watched a lot of teen comedies, I can say with certainty that this is a pretty bad, derivative, jokeless example of the genre for most of its runtime.
Yet this film is also so much more than that. Project X is an utterly fascinating achievement that gradually reveals itself to be more ambitious and eccentric than any “teen comedy” sales pitch would ever convey.
The movie’s most notable trait is its format: found footage. Found footage movies are made almost entirely in the horror genre, and there’s certain advantages of that form-content pairing. It’s immersive and it allows for low-budget bootstrapping in production. But there’s no particular reason why found footage format must be used only in horror movies, and I it’s one of my cinematic beliefs that there should be more found-footage-style films in non-horror genres; the lo-fi naturalism can serve other purposes. For example, I quite enjoyed 2021’s Language Lessons, a dramedy told through Zoom calls.
Project X tells via camcorder footage the story of Thomas (Thomas Mann) throwing a birthday party while his parents are out of town. He is egged on by his best friend Costa (Oliver Cooper) and third-wheel J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown). He’s good friends with Kirby (Kirby Bliss Blanton), who has long had a crush on him, or perhaps vice versa; the movie is not really clear on the dynamic with the small snippets we get.
And so the movie traces the entire life of the party: Its planning, advertisement, slow opening, gradual escalation, chaotic peak, and its insane tipping points. The movie jumps around in dizzying panorama of clips that create a boozy mosaic. There’s a deeply-ingrained euphoria and delirium in this film’s production, as the celluloid itself is on molly. It conveys as a love letter to the very idea of teen partying, as if inebriation is enlightenment, consequences be damned. I can see why it stirred even more controversy from parents than your average R-rated raunch fest — it’s a manifesto for partying, an idol to worship.
The film’s weakest stretch, by far, is its opening 20 minutes, before it becomes clear the movies ambitions lie outside of being a shitty, stylistically-odd Superbad knock-off. Those opening minutes are a bad photocopy of a rough draft, an aggressively unfunny and jokeless intro.
The movie grows more intense and chaotic as the party proper starts, which gives the of comedic material a bit more spitfire. It’s not as if the movie “loosens up” after a forced start; quite the opposite. It ratchets the anticipation and energy. Moments that would play like goofy punchlines instead have the intensity of a jump scare, like a surprise taser deployment.
The film also abandons any pretense of narrative momentum, instead offering uncut vibes. The second half of the film has about three scenes of actual plot, and that is not an exaggeration. It essentially abandons almost all pretense of story in favor of escalating its worship at the fractured altar of teenaged inebriation and indulgence. The result is truly one of the all-timer parties in movie history, and one that genuinely might be at the very top of the pantheon. Sorry, Animal House and Old School. Go to hell, Bachelor Party. All the stops are pulled in crafting a texture of debauchery and transcendence-via-hedonism; it is the unfiltered id of a reckless and horny teenager. The party climaxes with a burning ejaculation, a destruction of the sanctuary of youth. I was breathless, and I knew I was watching real cinema.
Much of the material within is crass — drugs, nudity, party stunts, cursing, fighting, vandalism, destruction — and some of it is savagely tasteless: There’s a runner about a midget punching people in the crotch that made me laugh more out of uncomfortable shock than legitimate amusement.
But I also find the film admirable, almost beautiful, in its worshipful portrait of its party and the ensuing near-apocalyptic conclusion. There’s rhythm and color in these tiny snapshots, not in a Dazed and Confused slice-of-humanity way, but in an MTV, assault-on-the-senses way.
To answer the question posed in the opening paragraph: After all that, I don’t think I can say in good conscience that Project X is a good movie. Parts of it are dreadfully grating; Cooper, in particular, is doing an over-the-top, shrill Jonah Hill impression that never verges into sympathetic or charming. But there’s something oddly powerful about how the film translates teen movie tropes into a visual beatification of a high school bender.
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.