MaXXXine Review
MaXXXine, like its eponymous character, is desperate to be a part of Hollywood history. Whether it actually has the chops is another matter. The third entry in Ti West’s impromptu X trilogy follows the burgeoning career of Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), the adult film actress who, after surviving a massacre in Texas, now aims to make it as a movie star. With its constant historical references and self-reflexive aesthetic approach, the ’80s period piece makes early overtures towards deeper meaning before squandering its potential – not unlike the trilogy as a whole.
West’s ’70s-set X was a fun, visceral throwback that smartly probed the dynamic between sex and violence in American cinema, though its gory murders eventually hit a point of diminishing returns. Goth pulled double duty in that movie as final girl Maxine and aged, demented killer Pearl; MaXXXine picks up several years later, and not only plays off the story of X, but recalls the iconography of its quickly-shot follow-up, Pearl. While a lesser movie overall, that prequel allowed Goth to tap into something strange and unsettling, playing a character so desperate to be a star that it warped her reality.
MaXXXine moves the series away from its rural Texas setting and replaces it with a Hollywood of police precincts and studio backlots, video-rental stores and movie premieres. While vying for roles in fast-tracked horror sequels, Maxine brings a suppressed anguish to her auditions, likely born of her experiences in X. But Goth seems to channel elements of Pearl in these scenes, too. Her chilling, unbroken stares are enrapturing, but likely illusory: They’re uncanny enough to make you wonder if there’s an entire world of thought and imagination behind Maxine’s eyes – or nothing at all. She chases fame, rather than genuine artistry.
The movie opens with a quote attributed to Bette Davis – “In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star” – which makes it all the easier to read Maxine’s drive as something sociopathic. It’s as though there’s a void where her soul should be. If she thinks about the events of the first film, it’s only in the context of evading the law. She doesn’t seem to have an ounce of survivor’s guilt, and she has no trouble violently fending off attackers in the dead of night.
But this, too, is part of the film’s illusion. The longer MaXXXine drags on, the more this apparent emptiness becomes a liability, and begins to read like a flaw in the film’s construction. It turns out that there’s nothing particularly monstrous about Maxine or what she’s willing to do in order to succeed, though in a dark bit of irony, the opening Davis quote does recall the allegations about Goth’s own on-set behavior.
Around Maxine, LA is abuzz with news about the serial killer known as the Night Stalker (the real-life murderer Richard Ramirez). In this telling, the Night Stalker’s rise to infamy coincides with people around Maxine being picked off one by one. But this premise, and everything West does to introduce it with a sense of intrigue, quickly falls by the wayside, along with all sense of theme and character. When Maxine is critiqued for her work in porn, but then asked to flash her breasts for a role, it seems as though West is reaching back to the themes of X. But that tension between sex and violence doesn’t stay particularly relevant to the story.
Before long, even the appearance of meaning within the movie starts to feel confused. References to older horror films and contemporary stars abound – it’s like a Scream movie without the self-awareness. A minor character, who ends up on the receiving end of righteous, subversive violence with a cartoonish flair, also happens to be dressed like Buster Keatson,, but this evocation of Hollywood history is without clear purpose beyond instant recognition. Similarly, an overt comparison between X and Psycho probes no deeper than their most superficial similarities.
The longer MaXXXine drags on, the more its emptiness becomes a liability.
This shallowness also applies to how Maxine’s backstory and career are developed. When she’s cast in the fictitious horror series The Puritan, its ongoing story bears an overt thematic resemblance to her own upbringing as a young religious girl who escaped the confines of extremism in favor of something lurid and downmarket. However, this reflection isn’t mined for its emotional potential. Neither the new installment she shoots, nor a previous one she revisits on tape, are used to enhance her story in any way. The role she wins is treated as just a role; she may as well have been cast in a romantic comedy.
It takes a while for MaXXXine to start feeling like a direct sequel to X. This is, surprisingly, one of its strengths; it tries to stand on its own before reaching into the past – not unlike Maxine herself, who would rather the darkest parts of her story be forgotten. When the film’s plot becomes more closely tied to its predecessor, threatening to expose what Maxine did on that Texan farm, her brief flashbacks take the form of a faded film print of X. But her memories’ distinct and tactile sense of cinematic aesthetic is nothing more than a fun gimmick, and says little about her outlook – or about the first movie’s events and the way they’re viewed by the characters and the public at large.
When the film begins, West’s approach boasts noticeable improvements over Pearl and X thanks to its strong visual style and a sense of rhythm and movement aided by a breezy ’80s soundtrack. Things even become briefly intense when Maxine is stalked by an anonymous voyeur with a camera and a penchant for killing sex workers. This callback to Michael Powell’s proto-slasher Peeping Tom makes MaXXXine’s games of “Remember this?” feel purposeful, but despite leading to the movie’s one memorable, vicious kill inside a video store, it doesn’t last. Rather than continuing down this Powell-inspired path, the story inexplicably becomes about a slimy representative of this homicidal shutterbug – private investigator John Labat (Kevin Bacon) – who tries to intimidate Maxine, confronting her in confounding and uninteresting ways. The slapstick Labat is dressed like Jake Gittes from Chinatown (down to his facial bandages), but that doesn’t magically make MaXXXine’s murder mystery engrossing.
The film’s casting occasionally seems like it might offer some kind of commentary, especially by placing women in roles that were often denied to them during the mid-’80s. Elizabeth Debicki plays a sought-after director. Michelle Monaghan plays a respected police detective. But all of this ends up in service of a story ostensibly about nothing. Its pieces continue to grow more disparate as things play out, and when its twists and turns are revealed, they’re executed with a complete lack of flair and dramatic clarity, leaving both MaXXXine and the X trilogy feeling empty and disconnected. While it features interesting setups galore, the result is a film that starts out exciting, but meanders aimlessly before going nowhere in particular.
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