Ti West, the writer and director of the slasher film MaXXXine, harbors under the delusion that pastiche and self-awareness are inherently compelling. Nothing could be further from the truth: your pop-culture obsessed friend and filmmakers alike need more than mere references to be clever. But for long stretches of West’s latest, a direct sequel to 2022’s slasher X, he is doing nothing more than going through a checklist of references.
Some of them are obvious, like when characters openly discuss the mansion looming above The Bates Motel from Psycho, and others are subtle, like when Maxine (Mia Goth) puts out a cigarette on Theda Bera’s star on the Walk of the Fame. These shibboleths assure horror devotees that they are in good hands, and West’s fetishization of them means he pays less attention to substantive elements like plot and story. When it is time for the central conflict to resolve, West treats it like an afterthought.
It is 1985, Maxine Minx is an aging porn actress in Hollywood who dreams of movie stardom. The opening scene is an open tryout for a horror sequel. She shows pathos in her audition, drawing from her traumatic experience as a “final girl” in the events of X, so she impresses the film’s director (Elizabeth Debicki) and gets the part. She cannot exactly enjoy her breakthrough, since she still hustles at porn shoots or peep shows in Hollywood.
But MaXXXine is more than a typical “star is born” tale. West infuses memorable gore alongside his film within a film, so there is also the matter of “The Night Stalker,” a serial killer who targets attractive women like Maxine, while a private investigator (Kevin Bacon) harasses her with blackmail-adjacent threats from her past. West follows all these characters and plotlines, including cops (Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan) who track Maxine, until she has no choice but to confront the killer.
West deploys an episodic structure, signaling to his audience that he alternates between Maxine asserting herself and the Night Stalker mutilating yet another victim. Goth is a fearless actress and Maxine is no shrinking violet, so the best scenes of the film show how she can defend herself. There is a moment where a street performer dressed like Buster Keaton threatens Maxine, and she ultimately destroys his genitals with shameless glee. West cuts to a close-up of the gore – with practical effects, of course – because he knows that splatter is a huge draw to a genre that is not exactly known for substance. The audacity of the gore is shocking, even funny, which we should expect from West because his film weaves horror and sexy sleaze in nearly every scene.
The film’s shock cannot be constant, otherwise West runs the risk of boredom, and so he has no choice but fill out his world with secondary characters. After the initial amusement of serious actors slumming in this kind of material, no one quite approach Goth’s zeal for elevating MaXXXine into great trash (in the Pauline Kael sense of the term). Cannavale and Monaghan sleepwalk through their roles, while the appearances of musicians like Moses Sumney and Halsey add some novelty as Maxine’s friends. Each of the supporting roles are essentially walk-ons, the kind to be introduced and discarded in short order. The meatiest supporting role goes to Debicki, a pretentious horror director that could use layers of irony that Debicki seems unwilling, or perhaps unable, to provide. The cumulative effect is an inconsistent collage of 1980s Los Angeles, rather than an evocative sense of time and place.
MaXXXine falls into a Hollywood origin story, a revisionist tale of opportunity and redemption, as the story of her mainstream breakthrough dovetails with confronting her past. This climax could have been rife with high drama alongside questionable taste, and yet West opts for something so familiar it is almost depressing. We see Maxine in distress, strung up by a death cult full of weirdos, and somehow he cannot envision a better way to resolve that conflict than a clumsily shot shootout. Indeed, almost all the big sequences lack any real sense of terror: West’s grammar has no sense of surprise, to the point where new fans to the genre – not just diehard adherents – will predict how each big moment resolves. West’s affection for this milieu is real, as is Goth’s unapologetic embrace of her character’s violent impulses. If MaXXXine is a monument to those parallel sensibilities, however, then it needs more attention to the foundation, not the details.
Photo courtesy of A24
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