Maxxxine
Ti West’s horror trilogy wraps up with his final film, Maxxxine. Not only was the quality of the past two installments high, but the influence by other films made them stylistically fun and separate compared to other modern horror. X honors 70s slasher films, and Pearl is heavily influenced by the technicolor wonder of the 1950s. Now set in 1985, Maxxxine reveres 80s horror thrillers, and pulls from real world events like the Satanic Panic and the Night Stalker.
Having survived the Texas Pornstar Massacre, Maxine Minx has moved her way to LA to pursue movie stardom. In the opening sequence of the film, Maxine walks onto a movie lot, gives a stellar audition, and walks off in her denim on denim outfit telling the girls in line, “Y’all might as well go home cuz I just fucking nailed that.” In just a few minutes we are dropped back into the wonder of Mia Goth as a final girl, who survives these films because she has not yet accomplished her dreams yet.
The excitement of Maxine receiving her big break is cut short however, because bodies of people she knows begin to drop, as well as a mysterious VHS tape arriving at her front door. Maxine interacts with the buddy cop duo that just can’t seem to figure out who is better at good cop and bad cop, Michelle Monoghan and Bobby Cannavale. They’re trying to stop the bodies from piling up, while Maxine is beginning to feel PTSD from her time in Texas as her past comes to haunt her. Kevin Bacon plays a mysterious private eye that hunts down Maxine and keeps threatening both her career and her life for his unknown benefactor. Maxine is jumping between home and the set of the movie she’s on, interacting with Elizabeth Debicki who plays the director of the Puritan II. She has a monologue of what movie making means to her, acting almost as a stand in for Ti West in this trilogy. A true highlight of the film is Giancarlo Esposito, who plays Maxine’s agent, who is willing to do anything for his clients to guarantee their stardom. With a number of other exceptional performers sprinkled throughout the film, it's Maxine vs the world, as she attempts to make her big break, find out who is murdering her friends, and fight the satanic panic along the way.
Between Maxine and Pearl, Goth has now played different iterations of the same character for three films now. The connective tissue between these two women was that they were always willing to go to whatever ends to accomplish their goals. We see Pearl go down a murderous rampage as she attempts to move out of her farm life and become a movie star, and Maxine surviving by the grit of her teeth so she can go on and become a sex symbol in X. The way Goth has been able to play characters that grab life whole heartedly has been the most compelling part of this trilogy. As the film begins Maxine crushes her audition, and then makes a potential assaulter turn into a sniveling coward beneath her heel. The first act of the film promises an emotionally hardened Maxine prepared to take on this serial killer. But, somewhere along the murder spree, Maxine begins to take a step back in her own film. She’s being haunted by her trauma, and fearful that her past involvement in surviving the Texas Pornstar Massacre will cost her career. But as she takes a step back in the film, so does the audience.
In the final act during the big reveal of the murderer West pulls out all of his campiest directing and cinematography. In an alternate version of this movie this finale is over the top wild and fun. But as the forward propulsion of the film had slowed and slowed up to this moment, the final reveal feels like a let down. It becomes a thrilless horror film, with only a final jolt of energy right at the very end.
There is something to be said about the themes and connectivity of this trilogy though. Creating three films, distinctly shot in different styles, and yet still being a cohesive unit is a hard thing to accomplish. The ideology of what people are willing to do to accomplish not only their goals, but fame specifically, being just as awful if not more awful than some of the literal horrors happening around them is poignant. In the words of Debicki’s character, Ti West has been trying to make B movies with A movie concepts and he has succeeded. It’s just a shame that this film is not nearly as fun and entertaining as the two that came before it. Part of that however, is because the two before set the bar so high that maybe the third film was always going to be seen as lesser no matter how it was delivered.