Review: Maxxxine

Is the style over substance a flaw or the point?

The best scene in Ti West’s Maxxxine is a chase through the history of movie violence. Aspiring actress Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) is pursued across a Hollywood backlot by a private investigator whose fedora and bandaged nose make him a dead ringer for Chinatown’s Jake Gittes. She sprints through a Western town, a clapboard city and then up the steps of the Psycho house. It’s a thrilling sequence and, like most of the movie, it’s filled to bursting with references to other films.

But there’s nothing to it other than its cool look and abundant references. It showcases West’s flair for tactile pleasures, but doesn’t say anything about the films being referenced or Hollywood culture at large beyond “hey, remember this?” It’s cool but empty – and it’s the film in microcosm. 

In 2022, West’s X was lauded by critics and horror fans as a revitalization of the slasher genre. The story of a group of young filmmakers trying to make an adult movie on a farm as the land’s owners stalk and kill them one by one, it captured the fetid, sweaty atmosphere of movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It was followed by a prequel, Pearl, which used bursting technicolor to tell the story of X’s villain, a wannabe celebrity whose fame obsession drove her to madness. 

I confess I have not gotten around to Pearl yet, but it has its admirers. And there are a lot of people who love X. I think the latter has its interesting points in the tragic story of its villains’ lost youth and the way that seeing beautiful young people cavorting around drives them to murder. But overall, I think X devolves when it becomes just another gruesome, silly slasher; the older I get, I wonder whether it’s a subgenre that can actually be classed up (my reaction to the recent In a Violent Nature makes me think I’m outgrowing the genre entirely). I found West’s film to be at its strongest when it replicated the hot, scuzzy feel of ‘70s slashers, but unable to escape being much more than pastiche. 

Maxxxine is an even more egregious offender. This sequel to X finds that film’s final girl, Maxine, now a porn superstar in ‘80s Los Angeles, trying to move into mainstream movies by taking on the lead role in a horror sequel called The Puritan II. Maxine is still haunted by the violent encounter on the farm, and it doesn’t get any easier when her fellow actresses are slaughtered and branded, allegedly by the Night Stalker. Things get even more complicated when that pesky PI, played by Kevin Bacon, shows up with links to her past and a team of detectives (Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan) begin to question Maxine about the murders. 

If Pearl was an ode to technicolor cinema and X a romp through 70s horror, Maxxxine is an even more obsessive love letter to the lurid, ultraviolent “Video Nasties” of the 1980s. West luxuriates in the video-era scuzziness, neon-lit ugliness and pitch-perfect needle drops. Since his breakthrough House of the Devil, West has been admired for his ability to replicate period-specific aesthetics, and the film is packed with callbacks to and homages to horror and exploitation movies of the ‘80s, from the split-screen sequences that reference De Palma to the callbacks to Psycho, Halloween  and more. But it’s not just the movies; West calls back to the paranoia of the time, when cocaine ran rampant, serial killers were believed to lurk down every street, and the Satanic Panic had all the church ladies clutching their pearls. West makes sure to include news clips of panic and outrage, including Dee Snider addressing the Senate. This movie sweats the ‘80s and, if nothing else, West can be lauded for making a movie that feels like a period-appropriate time capsule. 

Despite the serial killer hacking away in L.A., Maxxxine is less a slasher movie than a gruesome, De Palma-esque vigilante fantasy that finds Maxine initially unsympathetic to the plight of the Night Stalker’s victims to taking fighting against the people stalking her and others. We understand her rage early on when she turns the tables on a stalker dressed as Buster Keaton in shockingly gruesome fashion. As the body count rises across Hollywood, Maxine eventually decides to lash out, and a sequence in which she turns the tables on one aggressor with the help of her agent (Giancarlo Esposito) is a particularly nasty moment. 

West is interested in the intersection of sex, violence, religion and fame, the themes that had run throughout this trilogy. He enjoys juxtaposing scenes of Maxine highlighting and practicing her lines for a horror sequel with scenes of slasher violence and murder. Centering his story on a sex worker, he highlights how people in Maxine’s industry are looked down on and seen as disposable by the more “respectable” types, such as the police and the religious establishment and how, in the end, those people are also just as obsessed with fame and glory. As in X, he seems to draw parallels to the porn industry and the people who make slasher films; the director in X talked about wanting to make an adult film that had something to say. Here, the director of Maxine’s horror movie (Elizabeth Debicki) years to make “a B movie with A ideas.”

It’s a noble attempt, but West doesn’t do more than introduce ideas that he can’t connect or unpack. The ideas stay surface level, and the film is too eager to move on to its next homage or Easter egg to dig deeper. The film doesn’t stay with the cops or victims long enough for us to understand their characters, and while Maxine is interesting in the way her hard edge mingles with traumatic flashbacks, her turn to vigilante is too rushed and comes too late for it to stick. And a twist that makes the violence personal in the final act reintroduces the idea of religious hypocrisy but muddies the themes by abandoning much of what made the movie compelling earlier to become something else entirely. West is full of ideas – I just don’t know what he wants to say about any of them. 

That’s not to say Maxxxine isn’t full of surface pleasures. Like I said, West is an adept mimic and the film’s low-rent aesthetic is often very fun to watch. The cast elevates the material; not only does Goth continue to impress with her steely-yet-fragile beauty, but Bacon has a great time playing to his more unlikable tendencies, Esposito makes the most of his opportunity to play skeezy, and Debicki plays smart and intimidating like few other actors. West creates some suspenseful stalker sequences – a chase set in a strobe-lit nightclub is wonderfully disorienting – and he manages to make the violence shocking and some of the character’s deaths emotional. It’s a well-made film from a surface perspective. The problems come when it’s time to make any of it mean anything – unless the flashy but empty delivery is a commentary on the ‘80s themselves, although the film itself seems too confident that it’s making points that I’m not sure are there. 

I’ll be fair and say that maybe it’s just that I’m outgrowing this type of movie. Slashers and exploitation were fun in my youth when I could just claim that good style didn’t need substance and death was more of a conceptual idea than anything I had to confront. In my mid-forties, perhaps I’m realizing that it’s just not fun to watch lots of people die in gruesome ways, and that if I’m going to spend two hours with characters, I’d like them to have depth, if not likability. West’s thing might work well for others – I might just be moving on.