After surviving the “Texas Porn Star Massacre” of 1979, Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) moves to Hollywood to follow her dreams and become a star.  She lands the lead role in Liz Bender’s (Elizabeth Debicki) newest film, The Puritan II, and is excited at the road to fame ahead of her.  Someone, though, is not so happy about her rise and threatens to reveal her intimate involvement with the 1979 farmhouse murders in an effort to destroy her career before it even gets started. 

Ti West concludes his X trilogy – though an untitled fourth installment has been peripherally talked about – with MaXXXine, a neon-soaked film that turns the Hollywood Walk of Fame into a back-alley labyrinth.  Released by A24, this 103-minute film focuses on the schlock of the 1980s; the hyper-stylized, micro-budget kinds of films that now proudly sport the Vinegar Syndrome logo on their limited-edition slip covers.  As with his previous two films in this universe, it is more homage than sendup, operating in the realm of Paul Schrader or Brian DePalma in their younger, nastier years, but West’s clear affinity to this era of filmmaking seems to get in the way of the story, leaving audiences to trudge through the muck of endless references and allusions to far better films. 

Goth returns to the franchise, reprising her role as Maxine, and is being touted in marketing as this generation’s scream queen despite having very little “scream time” in the film.  Maxine’s arc is an intriguing one, but she is written as an absolute brat and it is very hard to fall in line with her.  It teases out her character as established in X (2022), but whereas Maxine back then was just one part of a larger ensemble cast, the Maxine we see here is present in almost every scene, yet beguiling has very little to do.  Put simply, it is too much of a character that is too thin.  It – thankfully – does not allow Goth to draw from the same weird girl well that she has become known for – see, Brandon Cronenberg‘s Infinity Pool (2023) and to a lesser extent, Pearl (2022) – but without being able to rely on her same own tricks, she struggles to pull away from the background in her own film. 

While Maxine in the 80’s does not offer much, the world which she inhabits is rich, almost to a fault.  Running concurrently with her rise to fame, someone else is gaining popularity in the City of Angels; The Night Stalker.  While paranoia rises as people fear for their lives at night, during the day, the people fear for their souls as Satanic Panic grips the city.  If it seems like a lot, it is, and West’s script suffers under the weight of trying to do too much, but West thankfully avoids the pitfall of leaning too heavily on the Richard Ramirez murders relying on archival footage and photographs instead of casting some young, hunk as, say, someone like Ryan Murphy may have been apt to do given their similar fascination with camp and the occult that was prevalent at the time.  MaXXXine, despite drawing so heavily from the 80s, ends up being a broader homage to Hollywood history more so than a pointed celebration of a specific aspect as the previous two films were.  The Bates Motel and Manor from Psycho (1960) plays a pivotal role in the film.  The Night Stalker sequences are operating in the same adjacency as Spike Lee’s Son of Sam (1999) or David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) which help create a heavy air of dread. 

But the aspect that seems to fit least of all are the detectives investigating the murders; Williams (Michelle Monaghan) and Torres (Bobby Cannavale), who feel more like the second in line for landing the lead roles on The X-Files (1993-2002) than actual characters in a film and a private eye John Labat (Kevin Bacon) who was hired to follow Maxine and ends up sporting the iconic nose bandage that Jack Nicholson’s Gittes wore in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974).  These references are not particularly bad, but they do begin to get a little nefarious when compiled with everything else West is pulling from. For example, early in the film, Maxine is confronted by an attacker in an alley dressed as Buster Keaton (Zachary Mooren) who is then stripped, humiliated, and beaten; appropriate justice for the character, but it feels like a smear on Keaton’s legacy. Later, Maxine is seen snuffing out her cigarette on Theda Bara’s star – a silent film actress who became a sex symbol in early Hollywood curating a body of work that gave her the nickname “The Vamp” across the industry – and the disregard with which these industry titans are handled gives all of these references a sense that they are being done in bad faith as if West is not just placing himself in the same class as these stalwarts but above them.  It is all very desperate as if West feels he has something to prove, and that fear gets in the way of him being able to craft a solid conclusion to his own trilogy, making these forced parallels feel even more egregious given their occurrence in such a lame duck of a film. 

This brings us to the conclusion of this film, that, like some kind of optical illusion, depending on how you look at and frame what is happening, it is either a rousing success or a convoluted nightmare. For much of the second act, we feel slightly unnerved by what we are seeing because West is flipping the LA noir template inside out. He lets the narrative unfold through Maxine, instead of Labat, going so far as to set Labat up as the villain instead of the hero getting caught in a web. It results in one of the only thrilling kills in the film; much of the body count is racked up off-screen, and while we are thankful not to see depraved sexual violence play out, the growing pile of bodies with pentagrams carved in them is rather tame compared to what we have seen in the prior installments. Away from the Texas farm, West does not feel the need to get creative so most of the kills we do see take place at gunpoint. 

When all is finally revealed, it comes to a head at a fancy estate, an exterior, poolside dungeon with blue underlight to complement the orange glow from the firepit in the middle of the land bridge that pierces the pool. The killer is unmasked in this Aregento-esque sequence to be none other than Maxine’s father, Ernest (Simon Prast), a televangelist whose voice we have heard across the franchise signaling the dangers of Hollywood and popular culture who are out to sell sex to the kids and deliver them to satan. To say this reveal is uninspiring is to be generous. It is goofy, it is cheesy, and Prast is asked to overact in the part, but West has perfectly insulated himself from criticism on this because MaXXXine has been modeled this film after the goofy, cheesy, overacting of 80s crime thrillers with big bold third act swings that often unravel a taught concept into a loose mess. In this way, the film is doing exactly what the rest of the franchise has sought to do, but there is a reason why these endings have fallen out of style, and without the benefit of nostalgia, seeing them today is a rough experience that leaves audiences uninspired. 

MaXXXine is a vanity project, dressed up as a tribute; whereas films such as Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022) seek to celebrate cinema, MaXXXine is much more self-serving and seeks to justify West. Much like the newest installments of the Scream franchise, when the references become the whole point of the film, the film is not a film, but just the insufferable, self-aggrandizing monologue of a try-hard. For a film that could and should – and clearly was trying to – show the disillusionment of stardom, it really misses the mark. Because it does not capitalize on this central theme, Goth finds herself with little to do and little to build a character around, instead just occupying a frame with flashes of brilliance, but hardly a character. It tries to celebrate the perseverance required to make it in show business but insists on making it gritty and grimy in a way that more closely aligns with the protestor’s views that Hollywood is a bed of sin. This theme is present across the trilogy, but the pointedness has dulled since X and the luster of the franchise has faded with it.