MaXXXine Review

Ti West’s X Trilogy comes to a close with MaXXXine and takes the series to a new genre and location.

Six years after the events of X, Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) attempts to transition from pornography to professional acting. Maxine has her big break when she’s cast in the horror movie Puritan II, but this is put in jeopardy when a mysterious man kills people close to Maxine and stalks the actress.

The X Trilogy has been a series of films that has a thematic connection whilst each film remains distinct. X was a throwback to exploitive slashers of the ‘70s, Pearl was a dark fairytale, and MaXXXine was a neo-noir thriller. MaXXXine kept the focus on filmmaking and the pursuit of stardom along with the clash of religious extremism and female sexualisation.

MaXXXine aimed to be a feminist film. Women were victims of being sexualised and violent crimes. In the background were reports of the Night Stalker, a real-life serial killer that terrorised the citizens of Los Angeles in the mid-‘80s. Maxine was traumatised by the events in Texas leading her to carry a gun on her person. However, Maxine was a woman who wants to take control of her destiny. She wanted to move away from the sex industry and was not going to let herself be a victim again, as shown when she was confronted by a man in an alleyway. Maxine’s director, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) was shown to be a strong and confident woman in a male-dominated industry. She was called scary and to be fair Bender was a no-nonsense type who shouldn’t be crossed.

Like Pearl, MaXXXine had a lot going on in the background. Pearl was set during the aftermath of the First World War and the start the Influenza Pandemic. It gave the film some relevancy even with the period setting. The opening credits of MaXXXine showed the climate of the ‘80s. It was a time of political and cultural clashes, the Religious Right was vocal since they were launching moral panics against video nasties, rock music, and Dungeons and Dragons because they were seen as Satanic.

Throughout MaXXXine the studio was being picketed by religious protestors because they saw Puritan II as blasphemous, continuing the trilogy’s themes of religious outrage. The villains in the previous two films were religious fanatics. The victims in the film suffered from Satanic rituals. The original Puritan film in MaXXXine looked like a fun exploitation horror film and if Ti West and Lily Collins want to make it into a real film, I would be all for it.

MaXXXine showed beneath the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, that the city of Los Angeles was a place of sleaze. There were peep shows, porn shoots, and violence, a town of rundown apartments, and women were chewed up and spat out during their pursuit of stardom. It felt like West watched Babylon which showed early Hollywood as a place of depravity. He seemed like he was particularly influenced by the ‘underworld sequence’ where many dark vices were explored.

MaXXXine was less assured than the other two films in the series. The story spouted off in different directions. Besides the main story involving Maxine being threatened, there was the subplot about Puritan II’s production and how Maxine’s issues affected the project. There was also a subplot involving a couple of police detectives who were investigating the Night Stalker’s crimes and Maxine ended up becoming entangled with them. X and Pearl were more focused films: X was a throwback to exploitive slashers of the ’70s and set in the confines of a compound, whilst Pearl was a character-focused psychological horror film. MaXXXine spanned the whole of Los Angeles.

MaXXXine was sadly the weakest entry in the X trilogy. There were great scenes during the film and far from being a terrible offering in the horror genre. It was too scattershot, which meant it didn’t work as a whole.