MaXXXine review - a bloody star is born

Mia Goth’s mighty Maxine finally makes it to Hollywood in Ti West’s brash conclusion to the trilogy he began with X (2022), which has become a visceral treatise on film’s 20th century allure, and the bloody downside of dreaming to escape.

X riffed on Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Eaten Alive (1976) as elderly killers stalk a 1979 Texan barnyard porn shoot, and found a haunting frisson in Mia Goth’s duel portrayal of murderous, ancient Pearl and youthful Maxine. Pearl then recast The Wizard of Oz’s Kansas prologue in a grim 1918 equivalent to Dorothy’s rustic home, where young Pearl’s incubating madness ends in an Oscar-worthy, endless rictus grin.

It’s now 1985, with real life rapist/murderer the Night Stalker terrorising California, and morally panicked conservatives perceiving satanic messages in Twisted Sister albums. Maxine is pushing 30, and has slogged from homemade Texan smut to pro porn and sex work on Hollywood’s fringe. Still meaning to make it more legitimately, she aces her audition for horror sequel The Puritan II by tapping into her X trauma. The film’s British director, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki, pictured below right with Goth), recognises a female fellow spirit driven to transcend their work’s despised status, declaring: “We’ll prove them all wrong in a beautiful fucking bloodbath.” Another killer is meanwhile on the loose, picking off Maxine’s few friends and satanically branding their blanched corpses.

West’s trilogy explores the lure of stardom for Maxine and Pearl’s mirrored female dreamers from deadbeat towns, in Seventies porn, silent cinema (including a stag film) and now straight-to-video flicks. Just as X drew on Tobe Hooper’s hothouse, hippie-slaughtering Texan nightmares and Pearl corrupted the tone of American Realist novels and wholesome smalltown films, MaXXXine deposits its heroine in an Eighties B-movie, and steamy, blue neon alleys familiar from flickering VHS noirs. Other scenes are framed with dream-like, blank backdrops, emphasising film-set artifice.

West habitually holds back mayhem, but Maxine soon sends a male assailant’s trampled balls flying in true Eighties splatter style. Maxine herself is a good Reaganite, self-made survivor. Begged by the cops to help save other women from her friends’ grisly fate, she asks: “Why don’t they save themselves?”

The Kinks’ 1972 elegy to stardom’s fragility, “Celluloid Heroes”, could have poignantly scored Maxine’s progress, but this is the trilogy’s trashiest romp, propelled by Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” and Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes”. Davis, maybe spliced with Ann Baxter as her ambitious actress nemesis in All About Eve, is MaXXXine’s patron saint, providing its opening epigram: “In this business, until you’re known as a monster, you’re not a star.” Maxine is certainly as ruthless as thwarted, maniacal Pearl was. West and Goth are anyway on her side as she literally squashes the opposition.

Following X/Pearl’s critically lauded diptych, bigger talent bolsters MaXXXine, from Debicki’s steely auteur to androgynous R&B singer Moses Sumney as Maxine’s gay video store worker friend and Giancarlo Esposito as her improbably statesmanlike Z-grade agent. Best of all, Kevin Bacon (pictured above) oozes sleaze as a New Orleans private eye who memorably corners Maxine in Psycho II’s Bates Motel set. MaXXXine is steeped in such iconography, with a showdown beneath the Hollywood sign, and Maxine stubbing her cigarette out on the Hollywood star of Theda Bara, the Midwest Jewish girl who was remade as America’s original vamp sex symbol.

Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022) spent vastly more to effortfully grasp at Hollywood’s essence, and Pearl and Maxine comprise the grisly, grasping underside of Emma Stone’s struggling actress in his La La Land. The X films offer lessons for Hollywood survival alongside Maxine’s, making a healthy profit on micro-budgets much as genre giant John Carpenter once did. West and Goth nimbly go on as the dinosaurs fall.

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