MaXXXine

MaXXXine

Writer & Director ~ Ti West

2024, US-UK-NZ

Stars ~ Mia Goth, Charley Rowan McCain, Simon Prast, Kevin Bacon

 

With ‘X’ being a fun ride and, when you realise Mia Goth is doing double-duties, it’s more impressive, and then ‘Pearl’ upping the stakes and reflecting better on its predecessor, expectations for ‘MaXXXine’ were high. Not that they were particularly deep, but West’s the top tier guy for era recreations and some slow burn with more interest in character than most. ‘X’ had a nice, sweaty Seventies horror vibe, superior characterisation, eye-rolling use of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and kills that veered from brutal to lukewarm. ‘Pearl’s recreation of Technicolour escapism/delusion for our unhinged protagonist and Mia Goth’s performance secured a place as cult favourite. There’s not quite the same throughline from ambition to psychosis as Pearl, but Maxine always seemed a tiny bit unhinged to me and that’s why I could see Pearl representing an endpoint of Maxine’s desire for fame.

 

But ‘MaXXXine’ doesn’t really hinge upon the potential danger she may be, except for the moment she stomps out a potential alleyway killer. Rather, the focus is on the threat to her. Or as Christy Lemire says, “MaXXXine” strips her of that spark and renders her a passenger.” She’s already a star in the sex film industry and now it’s the Eighties and she wants more, to be a crossover star. That means starring in an ‘Exorcist’/‘Omen’ derivative sequel called ‘The Puritan II’ in the video era Hollywood in a world of neon nights and sun-bleached days and threat of a serial killer – The Night Stalker. Having long been king of era homage since ‘The House of the Devil’, West delivers a fine Eighties recreation with lots of easter eggs, but it’s not hard to stumble out of bed and find one at the moment: genre odes to Eighties have been trending for a while now. The alley-and-video-store vibe is consummate, and there’s peepshows, giallo leather gloves, the requisite needle drops and TV soundbites, the Bates Motel and Kevin Bacon doing ‘Chinatown’ as he tries to blackmail Maxine. The revelation of the killer, etc, ties back to her history as we know it, but just allows proceedings take a turn into Satanic Panic.

 

The triple-X in the title is a bit of a red herring as we don’t really see this side of Maxine - and that was done in its predecessor anyway. Rather, we get discussion about the period’s hysteria against the genre with monologues by Elizabeth Debicki as a horror sequel director with big ideas and pretentions about “a B-movie with A ideas.” But where ‘X’ made it porn-making characters interesting and subverting their Deserving Victim types, and ‘Pearl’ used cinema to convey the melodrama of delusion and psychosis, ‘MaXXXine’ has no true depth to back up its argument. Indeed, Goth has been off proving more successfully the “A ideas” agenda with Brandon Cronenberg in ‘Infinity Pool’. There’s lots of hints here of more interesting routes that could have been taken.

 

There’s lots of incidental pleasures before the last act veers off into the crazy, but there’s little insight to Maxine’s vacuity, or the cost to her and others with her ruthless ambition. And we learn little more than if there’s a shotgun introduced and some heads are around, there’s going to be an inevitable explosion. As fine as she is, Mia Goth feels like she is being offered less here than previously: or at least, there are few surprises. And that’s the general aftertaste.