At one point in every installment of the Ti West-directed horror trilogy that began with X and now ends with the release of MaXXXine, one character delivers the line, “I’m a star” — most memorably Pearl when she screams it to a group of talent scouts in the middle entry.
When Maxine says the phrase privately in the first and third films, it reads like a mantra or a pep talk; when Pearl blurts it out publicly in the second, it sounds like a delusional proclamation. But throughout, the declaration of one’s own stardom forms a sort of spine to a triptych preoccupied with the idea of celebrity, with what it means to be seen on the silver screen and watched off it, as well as the ongoing cultural dialectic between sex and cinema.
That this line recurs throughout the three films is especially significant because they are more interested in theme than character: X casts Maxine (Mia Goth) as the final girl in a gorey slaughter, while Pearl focuses on the killer’s (also played by Goth) restrictive background. The final film, MaXXXine, reverts its gaze to Minx (Goth, once again) to tell a wholly new story, trading in the rural solitude of a Texas farmhouse for the buzz of Tinseltown.
Six years after the events of X, Maxine Minx is in Los Angeles, trying to shake off her reputation for skin flicks to get cast as the lead in a low budget B-movie named The Puritan II. Also featured in this overly stuffed third installment is a new killer — the Night Stalker, who really did terrorize Los Angeles in the mid-1980s — and some new genre trappings. While X was a standard cabin-in-the-woods bloodbath, Pearl was a portrait of a slow-descent-into-madness. MaXXXine is an attempt at an L.A. noir mystery, one that wants us to guess as the movie unfolds who is blackmailing our titular heroine with videos of her unreleased sex tapes as she lands the Puritan role.
The farmhouse that served as the setting for the first two movies, six decades apart, was a fitting one; in X, a crew of adult filmmakers contend not only with small-town life, but small-town ideals, namely a murderous couple who have been brainwashed into anti-sex attitudes by televangelism despite their own deep desires for sexual fulfillment. In Pearl, we see the titular character grow up with dreams of stardom in a claustrophobic patch of land, with a single road that leads to a town with a single movie house. The rural backdrop offered a place for bigotry to fester and for Pearl to feel suffocated by her own religious upbringing, despite dreams of becoming a starlet.
But while Los Angeles may seem the perfect setting for a film for someone trying to make it as a serious actor, the sprawling metropolis, by contrast, feels too big and unwieldy for this story. L.A. is often described as a “collection of suburbs” rather than a city with a central gravitational pull. Such a vast landscape sometimes makes the action of the film feel unmoored, with one collection of scenes showing Maxine reacting to a vague miasma of murder around her.
While MaXXXine’s setting doesn’t do as much heavy lifting as prior entries in the franchise, its main issue is its protagonist. Maxine as a character worked as a piece of an ensemble in X and made sense as a final girl, while Pearl showed us the murderous consequences of sexual repression and religious conservatism. By the time Minx returns in this installment, it becomes clear that there are no new layers of the onion to peel back. The horror genre is great for forging characters because it shows us the lengths people will go to in order to survive. Having already watched Maxine survive once, is watching her survive again going to teach us anything new?
Unfortunately, the ultimate answer in West’s trilogy is no. None of the information learned in MaXXXine is revelatory and the final 20 minutes take a narrative swerve that rob the character of any growth, and indeed feel like wasted time. Maxine doesn’t investigate the Night Stalker and gets booked on a Hollywood film with little problem despite her porn past. Despite the issues swirling around her, she glides along, often unbothered and unaffected. Maxine works well as an ensemble character; sadly, with her name on the marquee, she’s a bit of a flop.
MaXXXine is one of the most anticipated movies of the year due to the deep well of goodwill built for its first two installments. Each film switched genres and also explored in-depth questions about stardom, sexual repression, and American culture. In one pivotal scene in X, Jenna Ortega questions the smut film’s cast as to whether having sex on camera constitutes cheating: “So, the camera changes things,” she says when realizing that sex work is not the same as having sex for love. It’s a profound sentiment that works because people with different value systems in X are forced to interact and brush up against one another. Few people stick around long enough in MaXXXine to spark such ideological collisions.
When characters do try to profess beliefs, it registers as hamfisted, as if they are speaking at one another, rather than being in conversation. At one point, Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Puritan II director Elizabeth Bender, drives Maxine around the lot and talks about her desire to make an elevated horror film, a “B movie with A ideals.” Much of MaXXXine’s dialogue centers on the business of making sequels. These are worthy conversations to have, except MaXXXine only seems interested in paying lip service to them, or declaring them upfront, rather than finding creative payoffs for the ideas it raises.
West is a dazzling director and much of MaXXXine — to borrow from PopCrave — stuns. There’s certainly no issue with a film that values style over substance; Dario Argento’s Suspiria is a classic for a reason. But MaXXXine can’t decide whether it wants to be a stylized giallo, a neo-noir thriller, or a camp gorefest, and Goth sometimes seems stuck in the footage. This isn’t a film that should make us give up on West, but as a button on a trilogy, it stumbles in its third act. When The Night Stalker terrorized Los Angeles, he made people afraid to walk down alleyways and unlit corners for fear of what might happen to them. Watching MaXXXine, one gets the sense that there were more interesting narrative roads West could have taken, but his own fears kept those instincts at bay.
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