MaXXXine review – it kin­da suxxx

Let’s catch you up on the sto­ry so far: Ti West’s 2022 swampy south­ern slash­er flick X intro­duced us to both aspi­rant porn star­let Max­ine Minx (Mia Goth) and embit­tered, age­ing psy­chopath Pearl (Mia Goth), who end­ed up in the gris­ly duel to the death. It’s not a great movie. 2023’s quick turn­around sequel, Pearl, filled in the back­sto­ry of the epony­mous coun­try gal and her stalled efforts to become a star of local stage and screen. This one worked like gang­busters, large­ly down to Goth’s no-holds-barred cen­tral performance.

At time of writ­ing, MaXXXine looks set to cap off a tril­o­gy (though West has teased a fourth film in the series) as we rejoin the feath­er-haired final girl from X who is now a suc­cess­ful LA porn star, but one who yearns to crossover into ​“straight” film­mak­ing. It turns out that, unlike Pearl, she can actu­al­ly act, and nails an audi­tion to become the lead in schlocky satanist hor­ror sequel, The Puri­tan II, direct­ed by Brit ball-buster, Eliz­a­beth Ben­der (Eliz­a­beth Debicki).

Yet her dreams of main­stream star­dom arrive with some major hur­dles: an unscrupu­lous, pen­cil-mous­tached gumshoe (Kevin Bacon) who knows about her run-in with Pearl; and a ser­i­al mur­der­er called the Night Stalk­er who’s pick­ing off the best and bright­est in Hollywood’s skin flick cir­cuit and brand­ing them with a pen­tan­cle as his sig­na­ture. With one long week­end before she’s due on set, Max­ine will stop at noth­ing to clear her bulging and bloody in-tray.

With the dra­mat­ic uptick in qual­i­ty between X and Pearl, fin­gers and toes were crossed for this one to con­tin­ue on that expo­nen­tial curve. Alas, MaXXXine is the weak­est chap­ter in this throw­back hor­ror saga as West just can­not seem to decide what film it is he’s mak­ing. And by the time he does, he sad­ly opts for the most bor­ing and nar­ra­tive­ly under­whelm­ing one.

While the film plays meta­tex­tu­al games with its nest­ing films with­in films, it lacks for a cogent com­men­tary or any sense of sat­is­fy­ing for­ward momen­tum. The abuse and debase­ment of the female char­ac­ters is employed pure­ly for genre kicks, while the idea that the glit­ter­ing façade of Tin­sel­town has been fixed in place to shroud a fes­ter­ing under­bel­ly of vice and trans­gres­sion is going to be news to no-one.

Most fatal­ly, the Max­ine char­ac­ter plays to very few of Goth’s strengths as an actor, main­ly the thrilling, hair-trig­ger dichoto­my of being an angel in one scene and a dev­il in the next. Here she trudges through her seedy life with no real empa­thy or con­sid­er­a­tion for the peo­ple who claim to be her friends, a stock femme hard­case who’s deter­mined to land a six inch stilet­to heel on the nuts of any man who cross­es her path. Despite the fact that she’s being ter­rorised from all angles, West can­not muster even the slight­est scin­til­la or ten­sion or sur­prise from a sto­ry that reveals its entire hand in an open­ing 8mm pre­lude sequence depict­ing Maxine’s trou­ble­some childhood. 

While there are var­i­ous indul­gent visu­al and the­mat­ic hat-tips to the likes of Dario Argen­to, Bri­an De Pal­ma, Lucio Ful­ci and many, many oth­ers, there’s lit­tle focus on mak­ing sure the sto­ry feels coher­ent and that Max­ine is a char­ac­ter who you actu­al­ly want to suc­ceed in her bloody tra­vails. If any­thing, MaXXXine suf­fers in com­par­i­son to the all the films and film­mak­ers it so lov­ing­ly apes, end­ing up as a hodge-podge of slight­ly aca­d­e­m­ic homages that nev­er coa­lesce into a sat­is­fy­ing hole. With­out the unpre­dictable whirling dervish that is Pearl, West’s film sore­ly lacks for that com­bustible dra­mat­ic core.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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