I’m late catching up with Ti West’s time-spanning horror trilogy, but better late than never with MaXXXine opening this week.
X (2022) | Written and Directed by Ti West | 105 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Netflix
It’s 1979, and strip-club manager and aspiring porn filmmaker Wayne (Martin Henderson) takes his crew — RJ (Owen Campbell) and his girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) — and performers Jackson (Kid Cudi), Bobby-Lyne (Brittany Snow), and Maxine Maxx (Mia Goth) out to an old farmhouse to shoot a skinflick called The Farmer’s Daughter on the cheap. It turns out the old folks who’re renting out the house, Howard and Pearl, aren’t just the peculiar okies they appear to be.
If that sounds like a typical slasher premise, X is a whole lot more stylish and compelling than you might expect. What West is doing here is luring us in with the ’70s exploitation and sexploitation while the real horror bubbles up from underneath, a gothic fear of aging, decreptude, and the desires of seniors. There’s also a fairly incisive conversation happening here around repression, sexual freedom, and feminist power.
The only misstep here is in the double-casting — Goth is also Pearl, the old lady — which requires a suspension of disbelief beyond the capacity of waxy make-up to plausibly sustain. And the gore, when it comes in spurts and gushes, is the least interesting thing about the picture. None the less, this feels like a minor genre classic.
Pearl (2022) |Directed by Ti West | Written by West and Mia Goth | 103 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Amazon Prime
In a wonderfully perverse twist, West’s second film in his horror trilogy is a prequel, the origin story of the villain from X.
It’s 1918, and Pearl’s a fresh-faced farm girl, once again Mia Goth, all antsy and itching. She wants to be a dancer like the ones she sees at the pictures, to get off the farm and leave her cruel Teutonic mother (Tandi Wright) and infirm father (Matthew Sunderland). She used to get letters from her husband, Howard, who’s in the trenches in Europe, but less so recently. In the meantime she catches the eye of the projectionist (future Superman, David Corenswet), and joins her sister-in-law, Mitsy (the astonishingly blue-eyed Emma Jenkins-Purro), to audition for a touring chorus line.
This time out, West paints his picture in primary colours and an orchestral score, evoking Technicolor classics going back to The Wizard of Oz. We spend much of our time in the same location as the last film, except now entirely spit-polished and shiny. Pearl’s dreams are big and florid, but the entire enterprise has a bitter undertone knowing how Pearl’s life is going to turn out, especially the end of it — this is one of the few prequels that genuinely deepens its predecessor’s themes.
It’s, um, sex and death, with madness and violence in between. The role of the Spanish Influenza pandemic brings just another layer of discomfort to the proceedings.
About halfway in I did wonder whether this was working as a standalone movie. As part of a trilogy it’s fun, but by the second act it doesn’t nearly deliver the subversive joy of the first entry — instead feeling like a short pumped up to full length, something that might’ve been better served as a flashback sequence in X.
But then, in the final half hour, the bloody rush of the thing is undeniable — driven by Mia Goth’s absolutely monstrous performance.
MaXXXine | Written and Directed by Ti West | 104 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Hoopla
The third, and presumably final part of the tale, this works as a direct sequel to X, catching up with Maxine (Goth) six years after the events in Texas. She’s now set up in Hollywood as Maxine Minx, making a living as a stripper and peep show performer while aspiring for legitimate fame in horror movies. As she tells a casting agent, she’s 33, and women in that business “age like bread, not like wine.” She needs to make the leap.
That’s pretty much the only nod to some of the themes of the first film, which remains head and shoulders the best of the three.
We see Maxine get a big break, impressing a horror filmmaker (Elizabeth Debicki) who’s about to start shooting a sequel to her video nasty original and needs someone with Maxine’s ineffable ambition. Meanwhile, there’s a serial killer on the loose, the Night Prowler, killing women in Los Angeles. Maxine isn’t worried — she can handle herself, as she proves when she humiliates a mugger.
But was he the Night Prowler, or just your average Hollywood scumbag? The movie’s a little unclear in its plot structure, introducing characters like Maxine’s video store clerk pal, Leon (Moses Sumney), before rapidly dispatching them. We also don’t get nearly enough time with her agent, Teddy Night (Giancarlo Esposito), or two detectives on the serial killer trail played by Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale. We do, however, get just about enough of Kevin Bacon’s John, a private investigator who’s been hired to track Maxine down.
What West does well is recreate the spirit of the low-budget ’80s thriller, a whole lot of Brian DePalma going on here, along with any number of cheaper, sleazier pictures from the era. The look of it, the synth on the soundtrack mixed with a little of Trevor Jones’ Angel Heart score with those distant sax solos, it’s a compelling recreation. A few scenes shot on the Universal Studios backlot are a real blast, especially the visit to the Bates Motel.
What it doesn’t quite do is justify its existence. Once again, Goth is front and centre as someone who doesn’t need help from anyone, even to settle scores from her past. Maxine isn’t going to find any redemption because she doesn’t need it, but in some ways that leaves us in the emotional lurch. This movie is Maxine scraping some shit off her shoe so that she can achieve her dreams like we always knew she would.
All to say, MaXXXine is a good time and will likely please the fans of the first two movies, but it works far better as a homage to an lost era than delivering on the promise of X.
