When we last saw Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) in Ti West’s X, the adult film actress with Machiavellian designs on Hollywood superstardom had just killed Pearl (also Goth), the deranged, elderly killer of all her friends. In MaXXXine, she’s pushing 33 and still grinding in the dregs of the adult entertainment world in L.A., but her savvy agent, Teddy Night (Giancarlo Esposito), snags her a supporting role in a buzzy new slasher film, The Puritan II, to be directed by the Dorothy Arzner-esque star screenwriter Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki).
No spotlight in Hollywood, though, is bright enough to eradicate the grime of Maxine’s past. Following the template set by another icon of the industry’s infancy, Joan Crawford, our heroine’s dirty secrets become weaponized against her. A menacing stranger clad in taut, rippling leather (shades of Cruising) sics his goon (Kevin Bacon) on her, sends her incriminating footage from the massacre on Pearl’s farm, and begins picking off her friends. Against a brash backdrop of mid-’80s bricolage—Reagan on TV, the Night Stalker terrorizing L.A., Satanic Panic in full swing—Maxine must vanquish her demons to realize her dreams.
MaXXXine improves on X and Pearl by synthesizing their weak points and turning them into strengths. If West’s visual style on X was unusually fallow and his typically languorous pacing was improperly modulated to rise to the prurient demands of its exploitation-indebted script, Pearl was overly manic, oozing a treacly style like pus from an abscess. By contrast, MaXXXine is nothing if not tonally well-balanced, and it’s impressively restrained for an ’80s pastiche.
Beyond that comparison, however, there aren’t any other contexts that you can bracket MaXXXine within where it transcends mere pastiche. Held up against the history of horror, recent gems of the genre, West’s best films, Goth’s best films, so many films from the ’80s, films about the ’80s, L.A.-set films, and so on, MaXXXine fades into the wallpaper.
On its own merits, there’s little to distinguish the film from the run of studio slashers glossed up with ’80s nostalgia we’ve been enduring for some years. MaXXXine not being great doesn’t mean it isn’t good, but its flickers of originality and genuine transgression remind you of who made it. West and Goth are two of the genre’s most influential and innovative young voices, but their best collaboration is a film that any of their imitators could have made.
Goth, though, emerges unscathed, turning in her best performance since High Life. She was noticeably withdrawn in X, at least as Maxine, only to crank things up to an abrasive 11 in Pearl, but here she perfectly fuses the somnambulant and sycophantic poles of both performances. Her Maxine is brooding and distant. A notable amount of Goth’s screen time is spent observing and listening to other characters in silence—a thrilling subversion of star-vehicle expectations and thematically effective sublimation of movie-star narcissism. At the same time, she’s alert, paranoid, and laser-focused on things that aren’t eminently visible to us, allowing her to reveal glimpses of one affect to the audience while engaging her scene partners with another.
Goth’s relaxed confidence grounds West’s newfound reliance on exposition, tempers his even more depressing inclination toward fastidious narrative tidiness with some much-needed mystery, and relays in interesting ways with (read: distracts from) the film’s supporting cast, who seem to have been directed into heightened caricatures of ’80s film types. In other words, Goth shines so bright that she illuminates the limits of the film around her.
West has always been a wonderful director of actors and cunning manipulator of character as a tool within his scripts. One of his other strengths, a key technical proficiency that helped him carve out a new cinematic space between the fabulist horror film and the talky American indie, is his canniness with period detail. The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, and The Sacrament all ingeniously use the nostalgic trappings of the past to unloose and exploit contemporary fears.
First with X, then with Pearl, and definitively with MaXXXine, West has buried his unique style and forward-thinking vision under an astroturfed surface of compulsory cinematic references and cliché cultural signifiers. “Raw, real, and ruthless” is how Debicki’s Bender describes Maxine’s screen presence. Would that those words could have also described MaXXXine.
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