By Meadow Wattret, Third Year, Film and TV Deputy-Editor
Didn’t we all grow up wanting to be ‘a star’? If so, Ti West’s horror-thriller MaXXXine might put you off the concept. In the third instalment of the director's acclaimed trilogy, the rose-tinted lenses come right off of 1980s Hollywood. Titular character Maxine Minx chases her dream of stardom, simultaneously avoiding the rampage of a serial killer, and grappling with her traumatic past (as seen in the trilogy's first instalment, X). After X there was Pearl, an even more shocking, compelling, and vigorously praised addition. It was with high hopes that I watched the final piece of the puzzle.
Ti West has quite the passionate fan base. As the trailers started to roll in a small Watershed screening I, a proud member of it, silently prayed for a good outcome. I prayed for Maxine Minx’s final appearance to be as ruthlessly A24 (yes, that is an adjective now) and as gruesomely camp as before. I prayed that it wouldn't suffer from “Cornetto-trilogy syndrome”, and I certainly did not want a The World’s End situation - where the good, final film pales in comparison to its predecessors. Having watched MaXXXine my high hopes weren’t crushed, but they weren’t exceeded either.
Stylishness is always less important to me than performance or screenwriting, but in MaXXXine, the spangly, exaggerated 1980s everything is shoved in our faces in a way that feels appropriate. An overload of the senses made sense. Mia Goth (the trilogy's star) particularly strides around in luxurious, dominating outfits that encapsulate her power as a woman of the time. She dons knee-high leather boots with heels sharp enough to kill. A bomber jacket, black dress, and orange eye makeup combination in another scene serves as a fun nod to Blondie-esque fashion and the kitschy-ness of the time. My personal favourite, though, was a double-denim outfit. As well as this callback to Maxine's sultry dungaree situation in X, a student-favourite halloween costume for nearly 3 years running might I add, West's various stylistic choices perfectly intertwined the different films, settings, and Maxine's.
Style also occupies the camera work, and West doesn’t allow his audiences to look away. Everything is up-close, personal, delicious to watch and injected with heaps of camp. It's an intense, if exhausting watch that makes West's previous over-the-topness look frugal. But his balancing of glamour with gore is equally entertaining. West treats murder scenes with the same over-caffeinated camera work and saturated colour palette as does to show Maxine and her friends perusing the streets of Hollywood. Somehow, his crazy stylistic ability to attract the thematic and narrative opposites works. I think it even sends home the trilogy’s recurring message: Hollywood's shiny artificiality has a dark, gruesome underbelly.
Mia Goth's performance yet again proves she is the scream-queen to end all scream-queens and the beating heart keeping the trilogy alive. There's even something satisfying about the fact that while Maxine the character attempts to cement herself as a star, the film helps Goth near ever closer to real-life, much-deserved A-list status. If you're understandably not bothered about seeing a film with such a wacky array of plotlines, I will say this: Maxxxine is a romp if you like watching fun, ferocious female characters get theirs.
I was stunned by the lack of praise for Kevin Bacon’s John Labat, a sleazy investigator nosing around Maxine’s past. Again, camp is key: the character is so bad that he is amazing. With gaudy bell-bottom suits and a gold-toothed smile he added a much-appreciated smudge to the sparkling illusion of Maxine’s Hollywood experience. And when he wasn't busy adding a much needed plot conflict, he also helped West connect the events of the film to the events of X.
There are a few wrong turns - in particular Elizabeth Debicki’s clichéd and clunky attempt-at-a-girl-boss Elizabeth Bender. Her inspirational quotes were more TK-Maxx mug than MaXXXine; not what I expected from a script purporting to be wisecracking and self-aware. And as someone who finds the screenplay the equivalent of a make it or break it Jenga piece, certain lines felt vapid and threw me off. Halsey's Tabby Martin was a big scapegoat of it. Though nowhere near as poor an actress as you might ashamedly expect, her dialogue displays her personality (or lack thereof) purely to make us feel for her when she is murdered after 3 minutes of screentime. With a film so overstuffed with plot points, people and problems - Maxine’s more convincing Hollywood friendships with Moses Sumney’s Leon deserved more time. And don’t even get me started on Lily Collins’ Yorkshire accent. Let's just say I was disgusted at the state of it and terrified that Americans would think northern English people spoke that way.
And as MaXXXine progressed, the mess only got messier. The plot gets bogged down in some bland buddy cop sidequest that just wasn’t necessary. The cops team up with Maxine, and this on paper all seems fair enough until you're repeatedly battered by dull performances, colours, and writing. They stick out like sore thumbs in the vibrant world we've entered. It seems Ti West’s attempts to juggle too much increasingly weighs down the film, eventually turning what should be a climactic reveal into a confused mess. Our ‘twist’, not that it deserves to be called one, involves Maxine’s extremely religious father. And it makes little to no sense.
It was at this point that the film, much to my disappointment, became worse than its predecessors. Still, I left the cinema riding the high of the earlier, greater things. Leon’s murder was an impeccably disgusting and hilarious highlight. In a very cool parallel shot Maxine’s highlighter scrapes across her script like a blade tugging on skin as the literal same thing happens to Leon. A perfectly intense moment like that goes to show that when West does it right, a bit much is more than welcome. It's when everything became actually, seriously too much that I lost interest. I guess I felt robbed, since one of my favourite parts of a slasher is the ending section. The killer is revealed and the final girl fights them to the death and it's all a big success. Wouldn’t that have worked instead of what we got?
In Maxxxine, becoming a ‘fucking movie star’ comes with a few costs. Watching them play out through head-popping gore, an unapologetic embrace of the histrionic American 80s, and well, Mia Goth, makes the film a good watch. For die-hard fans of the series it might be best to go in with your high expectations suppressed. I’m afraid there will never be another Pearl. This edition's stand-alone charisma should keep you happy, though - watching Maxine finally triumph as a star at the very least offers up a boisterous conclusion to a boisterous series.
What is your favourite film from the X trilogy?
