In “MaXXXine,” the third in a series of interconnected horror films starring Mia Goth, she reprises the titular role from the first film, “X.” The “final girl” surviving a spree of killings while shooting an adult film in the mid-70s, we catch back up with Maxine Minx a decade later, a porn star ready to be a real star. She is tired of being looked down upon at auditions for “real” movies and being known for a lesser form of entertainment. It’s hard not to think writer/director Ti West relates to his starlet, toiling as he has for twenty years in the crypts of the spooky movie genre.
While that sort of professional frustration shining through the material might usually be additive in nature, here, it hangs around the picture like an albatross. “MaXXXine” is a film whose metatextual, cinematic preoccupations hold it back from greatness.
“X” was an above-average slasher film when it was first released. But what made the movie so memorable was Goth’s double-duty performance as Pearl.
“X” was an above-average slasher film when it was first released. But what made the movie so memorable was Goth’s double-duty performance as Pearl. Under heavy aging make-up, Goth played a horned-up, elderly woman filled with regret and jealousy of the young crew filming a porno on her farm who starts bumping them all off one by one. It was such a strange but sincere portrait that the film garnered a prequel, “Pearl,” where Goth returns to the role in the past as a youth living on that same farm during World War I.
“Pearl” was a revelation. It was a haunting and empathetic portrait of the horrors inherent to maladaptive daydreaming. In it, we watch a lonely girl stuck with an uncaring mother with only the dreams of stardom and escape to keep her warm at night. Knowing the whole time she is doomed never to leave and eventually die on that same farm gives the proceedings a tragic pain similar slasher fare seldom match.
So, it stood to reason that “MaXXXine” would similarly outperform expectations. Of the three films, it’s the one with the biggest budget and the most star-studded cast, with big Hollywood names like Kevin Bacon and Giancarlo Esposito mixing it up with popular musicians like Halsey and Moses Sumney. And if “Pearl” was purportedly written in a couple of weeks from a quarantine hotel room, this follow-up had the benefit of a longer gestation period and a larger apparatus ferrying it to shore.
For the first two-thirds of the film, it is certainly of a piece with the outings that preceded it, before the film’s most unsettling feelings take over. Horror films require a certain amount of dread, but here, that doomed, anxious energy isn’t about what’s on screen, but rather what’s missing: the sense that they’re really going to be able to stick the landing on this one.
Like most filmmakers, West is a geek at heart, wearing his influences from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” for “X” and the work of Douglas Sirk for “Pearl” squarely on his sleeve and imbuing them into his work. In “MaXXXine,” West trades in those inspirations for the seedy aesthetics of Italian giallo films and Brian De Palma’s sleazy approximations of Alfred Hitchcock. He paints a picture of mid-80s Los Angeles as a metropolis built on sin, with satanic panic stoking fires at the periphery of a murder mystery. Maxine lands a part in a horror sequel, “The Puritan II,” finally graduating from pornography to real motion pictures. But women she knows start dropping dead at the hands of a black-gloved killer just as a shady private eye (Bacon) taunts her about her hidden past.
When there’s violence, it’s suitably grisly. For tension, West utilizes POV imagery like Lucio Fulci or Sergio Martino and employs split screen and sweeping camera movements like the aforementioned De Palma. But outside of lazily gesturing to better horror films that inspired it, “MaXXXine” feels more like a meandering hangout picture a la Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.” There’s a scene where Maxine’s director, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), takes her to see the motel where they shot Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” She gives lengthy, pointless musings about wanting to make a film that transcends the horror genre in a way that suggests she is less a character and more a puppet through which West can plainly state his aims.
In the end there’s no real mystery, as the killer can only be one individual the viewer would need to see “X” to see coming. The stellar work Goth delivered in the last two outings is absent here. As her character repeats a maxim from the other two chapters, that she will not accept a life she doesn’t deserve, she becomes a remarkably passive protagonist. We accompany her from set piece to set piece, meeting a variety of big-name actors hamming it up to incongruent levels of camp. The film’s big finale feels like someone cut it out of the ass end of a Joel Silver-produced cop flick and superglued it to the final reel.
After the revelatory power of “Pearl,” a picture more potent than anything West had ever helmed before, critics wondered how much further he could go. That curiosity seems to have been his downfall, as he has written a script that runs off in several different directions fruitlessly. It’s okay to think you have taken a genre as far as it can go in your hands, but perhaps the solution is to actually leave that genre and not try to stretch it like ill-fitting garments you have outgrown.
The “X” trilogy closes on a major letdown, but if nothing else, it makes its predecessor “Pearl” all the more special. West has suggested he has a fourth film in this series he wants to develop, but if “MaXXXine” is any indication, he may want to move on instead.
“MaXXXine” is currently playing exclusively in theaters and will likely be available to rent or own digitally within the coming weeks.
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