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.

 

A Quiet Place: Day One

A Quiet Place: Day One

Director ~ Michael Sarnoski

Writers ~ Michael Sarnoski, John Krasinski, Bryan Woods

2024, US-UK

Stars ~ Lupita Nyong'o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff

Decent enough and executed well, but a sequel that doesn’t follow the magic ingredient of the originals: prolonged set pieces with monsters. Rather, we get a downbeat narrative led by Deathwish Pizza and anxiety more for a cat than the characters. Came for the monsters and set pieces, but Sarnoski offers a different beast, and that’s commendable enough except it doesn’t seem to realise that all the prior plot holes were forgiven by those set pieces. Lupita Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn are strong leads, making it work; the former bringing sadness and dignity to her fatalism and the latter especially bringing an authentic portrayal of a man guided by fear and general decency rather than machismo.

As our investment is in a lead character that is terminally ill, our concern isn’t if but when and how. It becomes not so much about survival, but rather her obstinacy to get a pizza slice across town to recreate happier memories before checking out: it all hinges on whether she gets there. Her fatalism makes her contrarian, and yet she still struggles to stay alive for her pizza moment. Justin Clark writes that it morphs into “a bittersweet tale of what it’s like to genuinely and fully live with a death sentence.” But there’s no evidence of “fully living” when the character is simply surviving an apocalypse, surely. So then it becomes about choosing your moment to die, but this doesn’t quite fit with a monster movie scenario. Or rather, this isn’t the film to unearth a new angle on the subgenre with that mandate. It mostly retreats into movie sentimentality. The alien invasion becomes a manifestation of a fear of death at any moment, or wanting to see the world burn when the terminal illness leaves you with only sadness and anger.

I may go along with the pizza motivation, but I myself am not convinced by the cat: survives near-drowning twice; turns up when narratively convenient, sometimes just disappears; seems atypically unskittish; and I am certain the anarchic, random and wilfully selfish behaviour that cats are known for would have gotten someone, if not everyone, killed. (Indeed, we’ve seen Eric trying to silently, painfully remove a package from a display and that’s the moment that the cat chooses to do its feline jump scare with a loud thud that has no consequences, even though just the ripping of clothing has been shown to summon the aliens). It seems resolutely unbothered by the presence of giant aliens which it would surely catapult away from or rub against, depending upon its mood. Maybe service cats are different. Maybe service cats don’t meow or make noise. Whatever, that is where any cat lover’s anxiety will be.

And if you came for answers to the aliens, or any illumination on their invasion or day one, there isn’t that either. Like the ‘Planet of the Apes’ franchise, ‘A Quiet Place’ has taken a turn for the miserabilism, meaning this is a little low on the fun and thrills to balance the fear and despair.

Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Director ~ George Miller

Writers ~ George Miller, Nick Lathouris

2024, Australia-US

Stars ~ Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke

 

Firstly, the pace is different. Where ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ was all revving up and then full speed ahead, Furiosa’s tale is a bildungsroman and makes many drive-bys and pitstops over time to chronicle her stolen childhood. Her nemesis Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is coded as still hanging onto his own lost childhood by the stuffed bear he carries, the one that he tries to pass onto her but young Furiosa (Alyla Brown) rejects. Keep note of that.

It's pretty with its wastelands, takes time with its tale rather than stunts, although when the stunts come there is no disappointment. There are lots of expendable War Boys and gang punks, noise that hardly abates, a bad guy full of bluster in Dementus (Chris Helmsworth) but who’s not particularly good at the politics once he’s won a kingdom. He’s no Immortan Joe (Lachy Hume). The facing-off between the bad guys is a high point.  Hemsworth is having a grand old time, riding his bike chariot and putting in a prime performance. The segue from young to adult Furiosa, from Alyla Browne to Anya Taylor-Joy is effortless, and the latter puts in a striking wordless performance; those eyes do a lot of work. The only male saviour gesture here for Furiosa is by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke – gruff and secretly humane in the manner of Max), and he’s just getting by too, but otherwise she is out there making her own code of morals and survival.

Which means that ‘Furiosa’ is even more interested in the characters behind the whacky names than previously. Or rather, never has Miller been quite so confident at giving the bizarre their trauma and credence. It’s always been there, but with ‘Fury Road’s Nux he hit a rich stream that he continues to mine here. Where the original film promised much that the sequel delivered on, with ‘Fury Road’ Miller got right the incisive study of a post-apocalyptic crazy culture study that he didn’t quite manage with ‘Beyond Thunderdome’. As Tatsam Mukherjee writes, George Miller “gives us another film filled to the brim with his fears and doubts about the world, and shrouds it in a blockbuster.”

Where there’s a typical given shallowness to the genre, rarely does an action flick possess such genuine despair and outrage and thrill at the same time. There seems to be some kickback because it did not profit as well on its opening weekend as ‘Fury Road’, or because Ana Taylor-Joy is the lead, or because it’s not as good as ‘Fury Road’ or something. As if something of this calibre comes along all the time. As if we regularly get a moment like the War Rig (and he’s directed three of these!). If it is lesser than ‘Fury Road’, it is surely a little due to familiarity and to heightened expectation. In fact, ‘Furiosa’ is commendably different in tone, being a fully-fledged coming-of-age-in-a-post-apocalypse story, although the difference is a disappointment to some.

Dementus and Furiosa spell out the themes quite clearly in their final face-off, as if the whole franchise is stopping to examine the consequences of its multiple pile ups. Like ‘Fury Road’s tirade against tyrants and patriarchy, there is more to ‘Furiosa’ under the hood. Any film that features, let alone begins with a female taking fruit from a tree is going to make me sigh, but by the ending the symbolism achieves layers that carries on the anti-patriarchal line of ‘Fury Road’, allowing for a non-subtle but nevertheless subversive underlay. - Are you sure that we were the sinners? Let me relocate the tree and the blame in its rightful place; and don’t forget that this hellhole is a bunch of male-dominated petrolheads brmming around being degenerate and stealing childhoods. - The symbolism may be broad, but it accumulates to a sophistication; this is more than just sound and fury. 

It’s a slab of definitive action cinema, but in saving all its eloquence and reflection for its showdown – indeed, the most articulate and self-reflective of the whole series, and one that must have been the big enticement for Helmsworth – ‘Furiosa’ ends with a little commentary on the whole bombast, reminding us that the whole thing started with the agonising madness of grief and loss.

And of course the stunts are jaw-dropping.