Review: MAXXXINE

Maxine Minx auditions for a horror movie role to exit the world of pornography. It's 1986 and Hollywood is discovering teenagers and what makes them buy tickets as Richard Ramirez is terrorising the city as The Night Stalker. Maxine gets the horror part about the same time as she proves she can handle herself in the nasty neighbourhoods. A pair of detectives trace connections between new murder victims and Maxine and approach her. They are worried because the new victims seem staged to look like The Night Stalker but differ too much, meaning there's another killer on the block. Maxine rebuffs them and sets about her rebirth as a legit actor. This leads to some enticing invitations from her colleagues but they keep coming back in pieces stuffed into luggage. Maybe she should have taken that cop's card, after all.

This is the third and final of a trilogy that became identified with roles played by Mia Goth in the first one, X. It was Goth who approached writer/director Ti West to flesh the Pearl character out while they were filming X in New Zealand under lockdown conditions. This led to her not only starring in Pearl but getting a co-writing credit for it. After this, it would have felt tidy to do as much for Maxine and maybe say a few things about Hollywood's odd 1980s.

After a bold and engaging opening act the middle progresses toward an expansion of Maxine's world and its relation to the murders and how they relate to her. But then, as the B plot about the murders rises in the mix it starts dragging, feeling complicated rather than intriguing. Then, while the finale is well staged and its significance clear, I was almost checking the time.

West is hit and miss for me. I do not share the admiration that his feature debut House of the Devil gets and while, The Innkeepers had a great premise it was let down by the conventionality of the ending. The Sacrament felt too literal in its treatment of a fictionalised historical event. X put me off with its sleazy phobia of age. Pearl, though, was a marvel, extending far beyond a vanity project for Mia Goth, it explored themes of frustration, isolation and delusion through the force of its star's performance and shaped up with a profound sense of completion. It's why I bothered with Maxxxine.

Goth plays Maxine faintly. It's underacting rather than stiffness and I wonder if that is to contrast with her wide ranging turn as Pearl. Maxine has survived the trauma of X and, while not a shut-in, is showing a hardened mien to a culture defined by its murderers and cinema of murderers. But Goth might be doing this too well as she can come across as flat in scenes where she might afford an emotion of two (as in the scene where she tells her friend she got the part). It does work in scenes of stress where it resembles personal armour. If there'd been more of those ...

While I appreciated seeing Maxine's further adventures, my favourite of the trio remains Pearl and while I'll always give Ti West a chance with a new title, this most recent of his gives me pause. There's an urgent comparison with another 21st century treatment of Hollywood's destruction of its human units but I refuse to name it. I only mention it here as its own complications of plot and character never overwhelm that theme. In Maxxxine The theme is so effectively buried that it must be stated out loud at the crucial exchange of the climax rather than left for the audience to mentally intone.  Maybe he should write with Mia again.

Viewing Notes: Maxxine is probably out of the cinemas now but can be hired through your favourite streamer (Prime has it as a 4K)