i West’s X (2022), about a backwoods porn shoot gone bloodily awry, was a fun, stylish riff on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Its two quick-to-arrive follow-ups, the prequel movie Pearl (also 2022) and direct sequel MaXXXine, maintain the first film’s stylishness but have continually diminished in fun. They’re so preoccupied with their conceits and how well they evoke the movies they’re inspired by that what made the originating film effective — its inspired tinkering with familiar material while still being frightening — has increasingly become a novelty whose one-time freshness is easy to long for. You liked to experience X. You’re likelier to have a better time talking about Pearl and MaXXXine than watching them, something hard to admit when West’s accomplishment — making an original, A-list horror trilogy in an era where that kind of thing is unheard of — is otherwise impressive.
MaXXXine is more enjoyable than the 1918-set Pearl, which tracked the homicidally-strong acting ambitions of X’s elderly antagonist and aesthetically harkened back to the silent era and the florid melodramas of the 1950s. Pearl was one-note but still worth watching because of Mia Goth’s committedly unhinged performance in the titular role. Goth also plays the title character in MaXXXine (she’s the sole survivor of X’s movie-length slaughter); unfolding six years after the 1979-set X, the film is more entertaining by virtue of it being more packed with incident, less vexed by its own unnecessity, and, I think, more aesthetically persuasive.
Halsey and Mia Goth in MaXXXine. All imagery courtesy of A24.
Texturally it’s a grab bag of low-budget ‘80s slashers; the shinily sleazy films of Brian De Palma and Abel Ferrara; and, with its black-gloved villain and ghostly Tyler Bates score that frequently recalls Ennio Morricone in horror mode, ‘70s giallo. There are multiple invocations of Alfred Hitchcock, too, with one pandering set piece seeing an actress character cowering in the entryway of the dilapidated house set where Norman Bates’ serial-killing instincts incubated.
Seeing these touchstones winkingly referred to in a mainstream movie in 2024 is thrilling until you begin to notice how few of the pleasures MaXXXine stirs aren’t couched in a reference to something else. When the film starts, Maxine is 33, years into an adult-film career unhindered by the killings she survived a little more than a half-decade ago. She’s ready, though, to move on, ever-aware of a porn star’s expiration date and prepared to parlay her sordid notoriety into a legitimate acting career in ways the likes of Marilyn Chambers and Ginger Lynn could only wish for. She hopes her big break will be The Puritan II, a horror sequel to a B movie directed by a crisp cocktail of a British director (a scene-stealing Elizabeth Debicki) who, like Maxine, is taking her assignment much more seriously than the world will probably receive it.
Though she looks confident strutting around town in flattering bodycon outfits, her hair dyed into beachy blonde-bombshell waves, Maxine is naturally still haunted by the massacre she’s survived, her biggest traumatic flare-up announcing itself at a particularly inopportune moment (getting her head claustrophobically cast in plaster for an especially gruesome scene in The Puritan II). MaXXXine is haunted by a lot of things in general. Maxine’s alluded-to upbringing among religious fanatics. A scuzzy P.I. (Kevin Bacon, having the time of his life) trying to blackmail Maxine over her past. The Night Stalker killings looming over greater Los Angeles, which may or may not have to do with why Maxine’s co-stars of late have started turning up dead, pentagrams branded on their cheeks. Tipper Gore’s fixation on musical censorship. The Satanic Panic. It’s a loaded-with-possibility milieu to force Maxine to navigate, and she often does it with aplomb. She memorably reverses course on one guy who tries attacking her in an alleyway after she wraps up one of her part-time peep-show gigs, and on another who’s pursuing her by car with a camera in hand.
Elizabeth Debicki in MaXXXine.
It’s hard not to be curious about where everything will lead, and also not be transfixed by Goth’s quietly ferocious performance. But the film’s collection of spread-thin subplots and half-baked ideas about mainstream attitudes toward adult entertainment and B movies traps MaXXXine in a feeling of eternal set-up, exacerbated by how largely uninterested it is in even the most rudimentary of scares or attempts at suspense. For a movie nodding so vigorously to the kinds of bygone movies gleeful to shock, unconcerned with whether their provocations were in too poor of taste to elicit more than a grossed-out eye-roll, MaXXXine is surprisingly subdued. (It keeps, for instance, almost all of the murders meant to keep us on edge off camera.) Even a climactic brawl under the letters of the Hollywood sign feels relatively restrained until a shotgun blast triggers a comically gory explosion.
Outside the performances of Goth, Debicki, and Michelle Monaghan as a steely-but-compassionate homicide detective investigating the Night Stalker’s spree, MaXXXine’s most consistent thrill is how giddily it subverts horror’s well-worn final-girl trope, which at worst requires a massacre’s sole-surviving woman to be almost cartoonishly pure and passive to “earn” her right to outlast her peers, and at best allows for some 11th-hour, self-preservational violence against the psycho hell-bent on extinguishing her. Maxine isn’t just the latter: she’s actively, self-protectively violent period, having understandably long internalized the belief that there’s no one else who can save her to the point that she’s unwilling to put herself on the line for someone else. “I will not accept a life I do not deserve,” she says to herself more than once, as if willing the mantra into reality. Her ruthless individualism ultimately pays off; I was happy for her hard-won victory even if I wasn’t about the movie that ushers it into being.
Peterson Reviews 