2024 | rated R | starring Mia Goth, Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Lily Collins | written & directed by Ti West | 1h 43m | 4 out of 5 stars |
Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) is now in Hollywood in 1985, 6 years after the farmhouse massacre of X, and finally gets her big break, making the leap from porn to being cast in a big horror sequel, The Puritan 2, with a director with a vision who believes in her (Elizabeth Debicki). But as her star rises, The Night Stalker is roaming L.A. taking out people around Maxine who, along with a sleazy detective (Kevin Bacon) and two cops on the killer’s tail (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale) force her to confront the past she has suppressed.
I absolutely loved this movie. Right off the bat, let me just say that I ate it up. It’s not what everyone was expecting or maybe what writer/director Ti West was teeing up with X and Pearl, but the auture horror director and his uber-talented leading lady/muse put together an incredible fun finale to one of the most interesting surprise trilogies in horror history. Not only do all 3 of these movies headline Mia Goth in duel role and going for broke as both antagonist Pearl and rebel hero Maxine, they are made in 3 different visual styles, across 3 different decades and across 3 different horror subgenres. I suspect that’s why Maxxxine may dissapoint the horror afficianados Ti West has accumulated with his slow-burn filmography, it’s not strictly a horror movie. But horror is a big tent genre with a lot of creative juice in it. West divides up that pie with the slasher film X, the technicolor descent-into-madness film Pearl and now a stylish 80s serial killer thriller that leans heavily into a Dario Argento Giallo homage and Satanic Panic satire. Along with James Wan’s Malignant, homaging Argento seems to be the trendy thing with this generation of horror directors.
Maxxxine is also something of a victory lap for West and Goth. It is in a lot of ways this is his Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, but instead of 70s Hollywood, West has recreated the grimy underbelly of 80s L.A. An area of direct-to-video slashers, back ally peep shows and an Argento-style black glove serial killer who see red at the thought of society’s moral and spiritual collapse. Above all of it, above even the horror inclinations, Maxxxine is an infectiously fun wish-fulfillment power fantasy for West and Goth. They drop a character they love into a new environment and give her all sorts of opportunities to deliver her brand of tough southern justice on all the potential attackers who don’t see her as a threat, including a fictionalized real life serial killer.
Initially, this may not seem like the payoff West was setting up with his previous films and that’s what’s fun about it. We’ve seen movies about people so obsessed and consumed with fame they turn to murder. We saw it in this trilogy already. It’s great that West side-steps that with Maxine, leaning away from driving insanity and letting it be part of the entire package of a strong-will immovable object of a character. Yes, Maxine wants to be a star, but here we find out the goal could really be anything, the point is she won’t stop until she gets it. But she’s a product of the times and it just so happens that fame is the very thing Pearl wanted so desperately and the very thing her father sermonized against (in X). Maxxxine recontextualizes this trilogy into a theme not about the cost of pursuing fame, but about rebelling against that particular time’s norm or boogyman. They tell you to stay on the farm and in your lane, they tell you to not have sex particularly when you’re older and they tell you to stay away from devil worshipping movies and music. Or you can rebel against the zeitgeist.
Pearl is the most beautiful of the three with the best, most unhinged performance from Goth. X is a subversively thoughtful and beautifully sad movie dressed up in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre wrapper. Maxxxine isn’t as deep as all that. It allows West to flex another visual muscle and have fun while running around inside his influences. This is a solid, stylish movie. A sequence where Maxine finds herself on the Bates Motel set that turns Kevin Bacon’s bumbling detective into Psycho’s detective Arbogast had me on the edge of thrilled. It’s a meta Hollywood homage, a period piece, a serial killer procedural, a character study and a Tarantino-esque revisionist history thriller. In a time when every other horror film is a trauma metaphor attempt at Elevated Horror, Ti West subverts expectations in the best way and creates an indulgent cheer-the-hero work that makes this kind of thriller fun again.