MaXXXine review – it kinda suxxx

Let’s catch you up on the story so far: Ti West’s 2022 swampy southern slasher flick X introduced us to both aspirant porn starlet Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) and embittered, ageing psychopath Pearl (Mia Goth), who ended up in the grisly duel to the death. It’s not a great movie. 2023’s quick turnaround sequel, Pearl, filled in the backstory of the eponymous country gal and her stalled efforts to become a star of local stage and screen. This one worked like gangbusters, largely down to Goth’s no-holds-barred central performance.

At time of writing, MaXXXine looks set to cap off a trilogy (though West has teased a fourth film in the series) as we rejoin the feather-haired final girl from X who is now a successful LA porn star, but one who yearns to crossover into “straight” filmmaking. It turns out that, unlike Pearl, she can actually act, and nails an audition to become the lead in schlocky satanist horror sequel, The Puritan II, directed by Brit ball-buster, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki).

Yet her dreams of mainstream stardom arrive with some major hurdles: an unscrupulous, pencil-moustached gumshoe (Kevin Bacon) who knows about her run-in with Pearl; and a serial murderer called the Night Stalker who’s picking off the best and brightest in Hollywood’s skin flick circuit and branding them with a pentancle as his signature. With one long weekend before she’s due on set, Maxine will stop at nothing to clear her bulging and bloody in-tray.

With the dramatic uptick in quality between X and Pearl, fingers and toes were crossed for this one to continue on that exponential curve. Alas, MaXXXine is the weakest chapter in this throwback horror saga as West just cannot seem to decide what film it is he’s making. And by the time he does, he sadly opts for the most boring and narratively underwhelming one.

While the film plays metatextual games with its nesting films within films, it lacks for a cogent commentary or any sense of satisfying forward momentum. The abuse and debasement of the female characters is employed purely for genre kicks, while the idea that the glittering façade of Tinseltown has been fixed in place to shroud a festering underbelly of vice and transgression is going to be news to no-one.

Most fatally, the Maxine character plays to very few of Goth’s strengths as an actor, mainly the thrilling, hair-trigger dichotomy of being an angel in one scene and a devil in the next. Here she trudges through her seedy life with no real empathy or consideration for the people who claim to be her friends, a stock femme hardcase who’s determined to land a six inch stiletto heel on the nuts of any man who crosses her path. Despite the fact that she’s being terrorised from all angles, West cannot muster even the slightest scintilla or tension or surprise from a story that reveals its entire hand in an opening 8mm prelude sequence depicting Maxine’s troublesome childhood.

While there are various indulgent visual and thematic hat-tips to the likes of Dario Argento, Brian De Palma, Lucio Fulci and many, many others, there’s little focus on making sure the story feels coherent and that Maxine is a character who you actually want to succeed in her bloody travails. If anything, MaXXXine suffers in comparison to the all the films and filmmakers it so lovingly apes, ending up as a hodge-podge of slightly academic homages that never coalesce into a satisfying hole. Without the unpredictable whirling dervish that is Pearl, West’s film sorely lacks for that combustible dramatic core.

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