Review: MaXXXine (2024)

MaXXXine (2024)

Rated R for strong violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, language and drug use

Score: 4 out of 5

Ti West's recent trilogy of retro horror flicks that began with X and continued with its prequel Pearl has already cemented itself as a series of modern classics, some of the best horror films of this young decade, a series that has made West a household name among horror fans and made their leading lady Mia Goth into a scream queen. Not without reason, either, as those two films really are as good as everybody says, X an excellent and brutal throwback slasher that had a lot to say about the entertainment industry and Pearl a chilling, technicolor psychological horror film about a woman's descent into madness. And just as X ended with a tease of Pearl, so too did Pearl end with a tease of the trilogy closer: MaXXXine, a film that would follow X's protagonist Maxine Minx in Hollywood circa 1985.

While the trailers promised a return to the slasher throwback well of X, this time in the city rather than on a dusty farm, what West has actually made here is a throwback to a different kind of horror flick: the giallo, a kind of lurid murder mystery that the Italian film industry in the '60s and '70s specialized in and churned out by the dozens ("giallo" being the Italian word for yellow, the name coming from an Italian publisher of pulp literature famous for using yellow covers), and which is often seen as a prototype for the slasher genre that combined it with hardboiled detective fiction and served as a bridge between them. (Note how many early slashers like Prom Night, Black Christmas, and to an extent even Halloween have subplots about the police searching for the killer.) I would not say that MaXXXine is as good a film as the greatest of its giallo inspirations, nor does it quite reach the heights of the preceding films in the trilogy. The villain's identity was both fairly easy to figure out and something that seemed to come out of left field, and the plot went all over the place in a way that only kind of came together by the end. It succeeded most in its non-horror moments when it focused on Maxine's trials and tribulations in Hollywood, her grappling with the trauma in her past, and exploring the blurry boundaries between "adult entertainment" and mainstream cinema, and fortunately, this was where most of the film's attention seemed to lay, with it being focused on fleshing out its title character as much as Pearl was focused on its own. As a conclusion to a great horror trilogy, it's undoubtedly the weakest of the three films, but it still stands on its feet as an effective character piece and a conclusion to Maxine's story.

The film picks up six years after the end of X, with Maxine Minx living the dream in Hollywood as a successful porn star who drives a nice Mercedes convertible with a vanity license plate. That said, she knows that, as a 32-year-old woman who's not getting any younger, her days in porn are numbered, and her only shot at continued success is to transition to "mainstream" film, which she finds when she lands a leading role in the slasher sequel The Puritan II. All this takes place against the backdrop of the Night Stalker murders that gripped Los Angeles in the mid-'80s, with Maxine getting drawn into them after her friends and colleagues start turning up dead. What's more, the killer knows about what went down at that Texas farm back in 1979, leaving the porno tape recovered from the murder scene at Maxine's door. Even as she "goes legit" in a film that will be released in theaters beyond America's red light districts, it seems that Maxine can't quite escape her sordid past.

The supporting cast here is stacked with names big and small, a mix of veteran character actors, rising stars, and non-actor celebrities who, given what was undoubtedly a fairly small budget, seemingly all jumped at the chance to show up in the finale of the X trilogy. Giancarlo Esposito plays Maxine's agent in his typical fashion (i.e. a smooth, classy guy who you nonetheless just know is willing to get up to some dirty business to get his way) and does it well, Elizabeth Debicki makes her filmmaker character feel like somebody who has more superficial class than Maxine but is still just as ruthless in getting her way, Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale play a pair of police detectives who serve as comic relief (Cannavale's character in particular being a failed actor who still has a flair for the dramatic), Kevin Bacon makes for an utter sleazeball of a private detective trying to track Maxine down and dredge up her past for his mysterious employer, Lily Collins and Sophie Thatcher play Maxine's co-workers on the set of the slasher flick she's working on (Collins as her co-star and Thatcher as a special effects artist), and the pop singer Halsey plays one of Maxine's friends and fellow porn stars, and while many of them don't get more than a couple of scenes, each and every one of them threw themselves into their respective parts and made for a welcome presence on screen.

However, the main focus of the film is its title character, and once again, Mia Goth has come to play. She's undoubtedly been traumatized by her experience, but at the same time, she's also a woman of dubious morals who's driven to succeed, refuses to let anything stand in her way, and doesn't particularly care who she has to tread over in order to get there, her most famous quote in both this film and X being "I will not accept a life I do not deserve." She's never been the most traditional final girl, feeling almost like a parody of the concept in how she violates every rule of slasher movie survival and yet serves as the hero anyway, and that's what makes her such a compelling character, helped along by Goth's outstanding performance that easily lets us imagine the journey she's taken to get where she is now. She still has some shades of the church girl she was as a kid, but she's even more clearly somebody who simultaneously rebelled against her upbringing and perhaps internalized the one moral lesson her father never intended to teach her. Even with the rest of the film having its ups and downs, Goth served as its central anchor throughout, once more delivering an actor's showcase that will likely mark her as a generational talent.

The film's writing was undoubtedly its weakest point. There are multiple plot and thematic threads here, including the murders, Bacon's private eye, the events of X continuing to haunt Maxine, the similarities between the porn industry and Hollywood, the manner in which the horror genre is looked down upon as just one step above porn (hence how it's the genre that Maxine winds up working in), and the rise of the Christian Right and the Satanic Panic in the '80s, and the film does attempt to tie all of this together during the climax. The problem is that I don't think it managed to pull it off. The plot frequently meanders, jumping from plot point to plot point, and while most individual scenes worked very well on their own, they didn't quite gel together even knowing how they were supposed to. A big part of the problem comes down to the killer, who turns out to be a character who was barely in the film before the reveal, and while they'd been heavily alluded to before then such that it was easy to figure out who it was, they still weren't much of a presence in the movie until that pivotal scene, instead spending the film cloaked in shadow and identified by an admittedly menacing trench coat and black leather gloves. It was the same problem that the original Friday the 13th had of the big reveal both coming out of nowhere and being very predictable after a certain point, salvaged only by a capable performance from the actor playing the killer.

That said, while West fumbled with the writing, his work as a director was still on point. He capably recreates the sleazy side of the '80s in his recreation of retro Hollywood, while at the same time making a film that's a bit more chaste than X, a move that felt symbolic of Maxine "going legit" (notably, this time Goth doesn't have any nude scenes that aren't lifted straight from X; those all come from other actresses this time) and probably helped the film avoid getting an NC-17 rating even if it meant softening its bite. There's little gore, but what we do get is suitably grisly, from a convincing-looking severed head movie prop to a shot that probably ensures that no man will ever tell Goth to "step on me mommy." There aren't many big scares, but West does a great job building a tense atmosphere as Maxine feels both the killer and her past constantly haunting her, before ending it on a shootout as Maxine and the police confront the villain. Even when the story goes all over the place, West still makes this film a very compelling one to sit down and watch.

The Bottom Line

A flawed but still worthy conclusion to a great modern horror trilogy, MaXXXine is at its best when it sets out to capture a mood and showcase another great performance by Mia Goth, which is fortunately most of the important parts of the movie. If you liked the previous films, I'd happily recommend this one.