MaXXXine: The MaXXXine Review

Image courtesy of A24

The third entry of Ti West and Mia Goth's X trilogy announces exactly what it is from the opening scene. Maxine (Goth) walks into a movie audition utterly confident of her ability to nail the part of a scream queen in fake movie The Puritan 2. She's got good reason to be, considering she has experience acting in adult movies and being menaced by bloodthirsty killers (both facts viewers would know from seeing X). The casting agent leads Maxine into her monologue by telling her that her character "through her trauma, addresses the camera," and Maxine/Goth does, looking directly at the audience. Do you see what West is doing here? Do you get that he's creating a level of metafiction, drawing attention to the artifice of moviemaking and asking you to consider the choices he's making?

Maxine's monologue dazzles the casting agents and Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), the statuesque female director trying to prove with a sequel that her previous horror movie wasn't just a flash in the pan from a director with more to prove. Debicki has said she based her performance on West himself. And speaking of winning monologues, Mia Goth won a bunch of accolades—and became an ubiquitous TikTok sound—for her finale monologue in Pearl. Anyway, Maxine's possible mainstream success is stymied by a few problems. First among them is that she's an adult film actress in a time period deeply hostile to sex work, women, Hollywood, and the success of any mix of those three. The other, larger problem is a series of seemingly satanic murders occurring across Los Angeles attributed to real-life serial killer Richard Ramiriz, the Night Stalker. And then there's Maxine's growing mental instability as she begins to hallucinate seeing Pearl, the aged killer from X (also played by Goth in old age makeup), stalking her around the Hollywood backlot—most notably in the house from Psycho. Hey, isn't Psycho about someone going crazy and hallucinating that an old woman is killing people?

X and Pearl both had their dalliances with metafiction. The former literally had the director character complain about pornography not receiving proper respect as an art form, a sentiment that West himself might have wanted to express after years of making horror movies. But Maxxxine takes it to a whole new level, constantly reasserting its own identity as a work of fiction in conversation with decades of prior works. Maxine's best friend works in a VHS rental store, excitedly talking about underseen flicks and the many actors who got their start in mainstream movies after working as scream queens. Wait, that's kind of like real-life actress Mia Goth, who's become a household name through her work in horror films! 

Metafictional flourishes aside, Maxxxine's biggest problem is that it can't decide whether it's a sequel to X, a spiritual conclusion to a trilogy that includes a prequel with nearly no plot points that carry over to either the first or the third film, or a stand-alone homage to '80s horror films and the grime that coats LA. Pearl was made immediately after X in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic; West already had a set built in New Zealand, permission from the government to keep filming, and a willing Mia Goth ready to co-write a prequel and jump right back into character. Both films are in conversation with another, retroactively adding another layer to the aged Pearl's murderous actions in X and making the accidental trilogy more than just a riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But MaXXXine was written months later, once X was released and Pearl was in post-production. That disconnect bleeds through the film. West struggles to connect Maxine Minx's story in Hollywood to her time on the farm in X, and her rise to the top with Pearl's hunger for stardom in Pearl. Failing this, West falls back on constant references to himself, his own career, and his favorite movies.

Image courtesy of A24

MaXXXine is absolutely stuffed with possible directions for the film to go, but the film’s plot is completely bogged down in its own satisfaction. It's so eager to point to its own references, so desperate for you to never, ever forget that you're watching a movie, that it loses the sense of fun that those cinematic icons inspired. Does it really matter that the plot hinges on a Satanic panic reminiscent of West's early (and in my opinion best) film House of the Devil? What is the point of consistently referencing giallo visual motifs like black gloves, a big blade, and the perspective of the killer? It's eminently clear that West likes those films, but it's hard to be sure what exactly he likes about them when moments of restrained violence in his own film are moved past with the anxious energy of someone walking past a dingy porno theater and trying not to look.

MaXXXine doesn't succeed as a horror film if its intent is to scare. Most of its runtime is dedicated to Maxine running away from, or beating the tar out of, Kevin Bacon's hapless blackmailing private investigator character. The scenes with the serial killer stalking through LA are rushed through with no emphasis on building tension or fear. And the "twist" of the movie is so obvious it's hard to even label it a twist in the first place. As a character study, the movie nearly works, largely due to Goth's star-making performance. West’s camera adores her, following her through costume changes, catwalk struts through alleys, power-poses against the backdrop of a junkyard or the Hollywood Hills. But she's let down by the writing. It's hard to get a clear grasp of what Maxine really wants besides an amorphous idea of fame. And it often feels like West can't decide whether to mock the character for her deluded belief that she can rise from adult films to mainstream success or laud her for her unbreaking ambition.

There are pleasures to be had in MaXXXine for sure: A soundtrack of period-appropriate tunes, some lovely replications of '80s LA, and actors you love to see on screen. Giancarlo Esposito and Kevin Bacon make so many capital-a Acting capital-c Choices that it's hard not to get on board. All of these are familiar tastes. If you recognize the original, you might be briefly pleased to get that sense memory again. If it's new to you, it might feel like a fresh experience. But there's nothing genuinely original here, and no real thought behind West’s visuals and references.

If there is something that West and I can agree on, it's that Goth is a movie star worthy of a vehicle for her talents. I'd just disagree that it's this one.

Image courtesy of A24