MaXXXine (2024)

Ti West's slasher/horror trilogy comes to a close with potentially its finest moment yet, as Mia Goth's adult film star Maxine Minx gets her big breakthrough in Hollywood. It's astonishing to think that his debut full length feature as a director was the first film in what has become this trilogy, 2022's X, which was then swiftly followed by Pearl later that same year, and now finally MaXXXine.

While X was a scuzzy, seventies style slasher, Pearl was more of a horror drama and acted as a prequel to X, telling the origin story of Pearl, the elderly murderer of X. Maxine, the sole survivor of X's mayhem, now lives in Los Angeles working in the porn industry attempting to break through into mainstream roles. The pre-credits sequence sees Goth's Maxine at an audition (in front of Elizabeth Debecki's director, Elizabeth Bender) trying to get the lead role in Elizabeth's new horror sequel, The Puritan II.

Each segment of West's trilogy has its own sense of time and place; something that has been so effective during the series, and MaXXXine is no different. The film is set in 1985 amidst a backdrop of Satanic fear and the presence of a serial killer 'The Night Stalker' prowling Los Angeles, and West provides us with a glorious homage to the time with neon lighting, video cassette tapes, and grainy flashbacks, making MaXXXine look and feel as if it were shot in the mid eighties.

He makes no bones about his influences either- during a sequence when Maxine is on a film set, we are shown a set of Bates Motel from Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), but perhaps more pertinently there are several nods to the work of Brian De Palma, himself a self professed Hitchcock imitator. MaXXXine openly invokes Body Double (1984) in a sequence in which Maxine is stalked by a Kevin Bacon's hugely entertaining P.I through a club to the sounds of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, as well as scenes that mirror the voyeurism of De Palma's film via Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954).

To add more fuel to the influential fire, the Night Stalker himself travels round flexing muscles and fingers through leather jackets and gloves, bringing to mind Friedkin's Cruising (1980) with its own night stalking killer, as well reminding you of Abel Ferrara's early work, namely Bad Lieutenant (1992) or even The Driller Killer (1979).

A more recent film that sprung to mind was Prano Bailey-Bond's Censor (2021), itself a homage to the video nasties of the mid eighties, and also set in 1985. MaXXXine's intertextuality despite being blatant and obvious however, works wonders for its duration, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Although nothing about it can be termed strictly original, West's film (and trilogy overall) combines to provide something paradoxically elusive- a first time director assembling a trilogy with his first three features that are all fine pieces of work, constructing characters that hold our interest and providing immersive backstory that actually means something.

If you pine for the era of video stores, magazines, VHS players and old movie theatres, MaXXXine is a joy to experience. Although the film has elements of early slasher films, you'd be hard pressed to describe MaXXXine as a horror film per se; instead it plays out like a drama replete with elements of horror and soaked in nostalgia, but there's still plenty to get your teeth into even if there's nothing sentimental in there for you. Whatever Ti West does next will be truly fascinating to follow. 8.0/10