"MaXXXine" review — Disassociated, disjointed slasher can’t keep the energy
“You’re a movie star.”
Ever since she was a child, Maxine Miller dreamed of becoming a star. From her humble southern origins dancing on the church stage to her struggle for notoriety in 1980s Hollywood, Maxine has the tenacity to fight for her spot in the limelight. “I will not accept a life I do not deserve,” she repeats to herself incessantly, a phrase her preacher father used to tell her when she was young. What that life might be is still a nebulous concept to her. She dreams of being a star, but the sacrifices and moral compromises she’s forced to make might challenge that notion of success. As she’s reminded by one actor-turned-FBI agent, in this city, it’s easier to become infamous than famous. Yet, Maxine, now going by the stage name “Maxine Minx,” isn’t going to let anyone or anything tell her that she can’t make it. She was born to be a star. Despite her dreams of glitz and glory, she’s trapped in the seedier parts of town, one plagued by crime, drugs, and the fiendish serial killer, the Night Stalker.
MaXXXine, the third piece of Ti West’s horror series that began with 2022’s X and Pearl, continues the trilogy’s love of old-school slashers and genre films. Set some years into the future, a harrowed Maxine (played by Mia Goth, who also serves as a producer here) struggles to rise above her less-than-glamourous beginnings in the adult film industry. Unfortunately, MaXXXine is far from X’s 70s retro charms or the unnerving narrative of Pearl, the 20s-set prequel, leaving the creative energy of those films as a distant memory. Cluttered and misguided, the film is a deeply disappointing follow-up to two films I had greatly enjoyed. Where X and Pearl were fun genre pastiches, MaXXXine seems to miss its predecessors’ simplistic yet memorable design for a more emotionally weighty but misjudged approach. The film struggles to develop its characters — its lead and its supporting cast — beyond archetypes, lacks any sense of genuine narrative tension and comes apart in a messy third act. It’s not all for naught: some fun performances, gorgeous cinematography, and some excellent gore keep at least some thrills for the horror fans around.
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| Photo via A24. |
We’re picking up some years after the events of X, now firmly into the mid-1980s, an era of Reaganomics, the heyday of slasher series like Friday the 13th, and the reign of terror of the Night Stalker. Maxine, still haunted by what happened on Pearl and Howard’s Texas farm that fateful summer, has been trying desperately to get out of the exploitative industry she’s stuck in. Her chance at real stardom comes through an audition for The Puritan II and its ferocious director, Elizabeth Bender (played by Elizabeth Debicki). Maxine is strong-willed and defiant, something that impresses Bender, who fights the studio to offer her the part. Meanwhile, death comes to Maxine’s corner of Los Angeles when several friends end up dead in a murder shockingly similar to that of the Night Stalker. And then, one night, while watching the original Puritan on VHS with her best friend Leon (played by Moses Sumney), Maxine receives a tape in the mail: one containing the footage of the Texas murders that might send Maxine to prison.
Now, Maxine herself might be one of our biggest problems here. While Mia Goth’s performance is as unhinged and psychotic as ever, the screenplay struggles to make Maxine a character worth investing in. Her aspirations of fame and fortune are never deepened beyond the surface, nor are they ever complicated or challenged. The film is clearly trying to avoid repeating the character beats of Pearl, which featured Goth as a similar “southerner with the dream of stardom,” but instead of taking Maxine in a new direction, it simply goose steps around those shared ideas without offering anything new or expanding upon them. X and Pearl were dead simple in their emotional material, focusing instead on their genre flourishes, something that has divided critics of the series. MaXXXine wants to up the emotional tension by giving its title character a more dynamic, complex role, but the film hardly challenges or integrates Maxine in any interesting way, making her as two-dimensional as she was in the previous film. Maxine worked well as the de facto lead of X because her character was balanced with a memorable ensemble. But here, West hardly bothers to flesh out his supporting cast.
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| Photo via A24. |
The supporting characters, for the most part, feel so distant from the terror of the Night Stalker imitator that there’s never much of a threat felt to those close to Maxine, taking away from the inherent fun of a slasher. West attempts to balance this by introducing a rotating door of faces that serve no other purpose than to die. But the integration of these characters into the story is so obvious, that there’s hardly any tension regarding their inevitable fates. Now, many of the other performers in the film put in some gallant performances. Kevin Bacon’s slimy private investigator John Labat, Giancarlo Esposito’s sleazy agent Teddy Knight, and Elizabeth Debicki’s self-assured and pretentious film director Elizabeth Bender are all strong additions, but, again, they feel so isolated from the film’s central horror narrative that they are utterly insignificant. If we’re telling a slasher story, why are so many of the central characters predestined to be “safe?”
The Night Stalker, the media-given alias of serial killer Richard Ramirez, plays a key role in the film’s context, with the film’s killer channelling the real-life murderer’s satanic M.O., although quickly recognized to be a copycat by FBI investigators Detective Williams (played by Michelle Monaghan) and Detective Torres (played by Bobby Cannavale). This historical inclusion is a cop-out from West. Instead of crafting a unique villain for his film — the villains are what made the horror franchises of the 70s and 80s so memorable — he uses a real-world figure and then undermines that inclusion by using an original character anyway. It all makes the film’s villain (and the third act revelations of his identity and plan) feel totally weightless and like a total shift from what has come before. The film doesn’t do anything particularly interesting with its temporal setting either. X was a contemporary reinvention of films like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Pearl played with creative ideas borrowed from Hollywood’s silent age with a more macabre tint. MaXXXine, instead, feels like nothing more than the 1980s slapped on top of a generic, underdeveloped horror film.
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| Photo via A24. |
There are some influences from 1980s-era Hollywood that crop up from time to time, although not as baked into the DNA of this film compared to the others in the series. Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984) is a pretty clear influence, from the film’s visual aesthetics, tone, morality, and religious zeal. But instead of embracing the grime, MaXXXine is a tiresome, trite imitation. The disparate elements of the film’s story are infuriatingly segmented, never coming together in a way that would make the whole affair feel like a singular story. Shockingly, The Puritan II, the film-within-the-film, never plays with the film’s wider narrative regarding Satanism and extremist religion, aside from one short instance involving actress Molly Bennett (played by Lily Collins). By the third act, the film spirals so firmly out of control that it’s lost in a mush of vapid 80s iconography and confusing ideas. With a cult-ish angle introduced in the final moments, one cannot help but be utterly confounded as to why such an interesting concept was introduced so late and then promptly never develops further.
Despite all of these elements of religious transgression, MaXXXine is never particularly transgressive. Sure, there are some (very) strong moments of gore, but those are no more than pockets within a rather tame framework. MaXXXine is shockingly disappointing. The seeds of a good, if not great, horror film are all present, but Ti West develops any of his central ideas, characters, or narrative. The film is a barrage of bewilderingly bizarre choices that never coalesce into something interesting. Goth might be a fantastic performer, but West’s script lets her down. People like Bacon and Esposito try their damndest to pull their characters out of the mud, but it’s so much effort for very little reward. It is incredibly disappointing, especially given how much I enjoyed X and Pearl. West imitates his betters, plays with interesting ideas, and has some very beautifully squeamish moments, but under it all, MaXXXine is totally hollow, just like the title character. The film never has the guts to truly offend.
MaXXXine is now playing in theatres.
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