MaXXXine
Ti West’s X trilogy comes to a shallow close.
Ti West’s X trilogy is a series of exploitation homages about fame, infamy, and desire, each movie framed as a different subgenre. They’re more interested in exploiting the movies they reference than they are in saying anything substantial about their own subject matter. West’s scripts and direction draw dotted lines between fame and sex and between sex and death, but he never manages to expand on these sketched-out connections. The series is quick to point out that sex, death, and fame all look very similar, but it lingers on the observation, a repetitive exercise no matter how many different genres West throws into the X blender.
X, the first movie in the series, follows Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) and a group of her friends to a rural farm, where they intend to make an adult movie on the cheap in the hopes that they’ll get famous. When the elderly owners of the farm (one of whom is also played by Mia Goth under heavy old-person makeup) learn about their guests’ plans, the film turns from ’70s sexploitation into a slasher, borrowing most of its aesthetics from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The prequel, Pearl, turns back time, exploring the origins of Mia Goth’s farmhouse owner in a cheeky send-up of Technicolor melodramas that paints the exploitation of eager aspiring starlets with a bucket of bright-red blood. MaXXXine, in turn, skips forward in time and across genres once again, this time landing in the middle of cocaine-fueled 1980s Hollywood.
MaXXXine mashes together the X formula with Hollywood franchise horror and the erotic thrillers of the ’80s: a setting full of excess and the moral panic that peppered the decade. Maxine Minx has left the events of X behind her. She’s now working as an adult-film actress in Los Angeles, and she has just landed a role in a “legitimate” movie that she hopes will help her become a crossover movie star. Her big break comes in the form of the leading role in a horror sequel called The Puritan II, an appropriate choice given the crowds of Satanic Panic protesters outside the studio backlot.
Maxine doesn’t care about the protesters who hate her for her profession. She also seems blasé about a Satanist serial killer—the real-life Night Stalker—haunting Los Angeles. She’s more concerned with becoming famous: she will do anything to get it, and she will do it without remorse. She repeats a mantra her preacher father taught her when she was a child: “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” She believes she’s a star, that she has the “X factor,” that she’s supposed to be famous. She isn’t ashamed of her work. She’s fine with infamy on her own terms, as long as she thinks it will get her where she wants to go. But when a detective (Kevin Bacon with a syrupy drawl) comes knocking with evidence of her involvement with the farmhouse massacre from X, she begins to panic. She wants fame, and she wants to control the narrative around herself, two desires that often are opposed to each other. Her uncompromising approach to her career seeps into her dealings with the detective, with bloody consequences.
Maxine is willing to bare it all, taking off her top without hesitation when she’s asked to do so in an audition. The casting director doesn’t seem to fully clock her own hypocrisy when she raises an eyebrow at Maxine’s résumé before asking her to undress. The most interesting pieces of the movie circle around hypocrisy in Hollywood in particular and the media in general: everyone is judgmental of everyone else, from the casting director to the cops trying to play at being trustworthy when their investigation of the Night Stalker crosses paths with Maxine’s career.
West’s observations about hypocrisy never get further than pointing out that they exist. Nor does the story examine its heroine’s motivations, let alone her own hypocrisy—it’s fine that Maxine is ruthless, because she’s a star and because she deserves the good things that she’s fighting for. It’s an attitude straight out of prosperity gospel teachings: work hard and believe you deserve it, and you will get everything your heart desires. The movie is quick to point out the inherent contradictions in Maxine’s father’s beliefs, but it remains curiously charitable toward her own desires and motivations, even after she gets blood on her hands.
The closest the movie gets to questioning Maxine’s motivations is a sequence in which she studies her lines for her upcoming role, slashing her highlighter across the page in shots that are intercut with a scene of another character being murdered, highlighter and knife echoing each others’ movements in grisly visual poetry. The editing is good, but the sequence peters out: it has purpose only for as long as it can deliver the visual rhyme. Thematically, there’s still a disconnect. It’s unclear why this specific murder must take place, juxtaposed as it is against Maxine’s own work. Later, when the work gets dirtier, the film presents the blood on Maxine’s hands as a simple fact of life, something she needed to do in order to survive. Perhaps it’s another jab at the compromises people need to make in order to get by in Hollywood, but Maxine-as-final-girl doesn’t fully square with the experienced Maxine of this film.
As an anti-heroine, Maxine could be interesting. Goth is as committed in her performance as Maxine is in her own roles on and off the camera. The production design, costuming, and makeup capture the excess of the movie’s setting. But the story does little more than gesture toward these elements, as though placing two similar ideas next to each other is enough. There’s still no substantial connective tissue. Fame and sex and death are all intertwined somehow, but we already knew that. If Ti West has anything more to say about them, he hasn’t managed to communicate it across the X series. Despite the gore, the excess, and the movie’s ambitions, it all boils down to a bloodless conclusion.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★☆☆☆
MaXXXine is in theaters now.