A Dazzling Mia Goth Will Stop at Nothing to Achieve Her Silver Screen Dreams in MaXXXine

MAXXXINE 

(Ti West, 2024, USA, 104 minutes) 

The thing about Maxine Minx (née Maxine Miller) is that she is not a good person. Not because she's an adult film star or because she enjoys the occasional bump of cocaine, but because she won't let anything–and I mean anything–stand in the way of her success. 

In X, the first film in writer/director Ti West's retro slasher trilogy, Maxine (Mia Goth in a role that fits her like a black leather glove) turned killer in order to defend herself from two geriatric psychos. By the end, she took some glee in the killing, but Maxine was ultimately a heroic final girl, whereas Pearl is the origin story of a villain (Goth played Pearl, at different stages of her life, in the first two films; there is no Pearl in the third).  

In MaXXXine, Goth is neither hero nor villain, but a little of both: she's an antihero. Maxine does bad things, but it's hard not to root for her success, because she's plucky as hell and her enemies are worse. Plus, no one in these films is without sin; they're all flawed or compromised in some way.

Much like Naomi Watts's Betty (left) in 2001's Mulholland Drive, Maxine doesn't just have looks and drive, she has real talent. If Betty--and her alter ego, Diane--doesn't find fame in David Lynch's nightmarish noir, Maxine will have better luck in Ti West's…though there's a difference between fame and infamy. 

After two films set in Texas, West catches up with Maxine, seven years after the events of X, in Los Angeles. At 33, she knows her days as an adult film performer are limited, so she's been auditioning for metal videos and genre films, like the lead in the sequel to a film-within-the-film called The Puritan. 

In real life, adult film performers rarely, if ever, get cast as leads in non-pornographic features, horror or otherwise. Marilyn Chambers (below) famously appeared in David Cronenberg's 1977 Rabid–she gets a namecheck in MaXXXine–but it didn't make her a straight star (at one point, Maxine is even seen watching Behind the Green Door on video). More often, they're hired to play strippers and murder victims, and not often enough to build a legit career. Even Traci Lords and Ginger Lynn could only get so far. 

I'm certain Ti West is aware of all of this, but Maxine's casting in The Puritan II feeds into the plot and makes for a lovely fantasy–dulled only by the fact that the casting director asks Maxine to bare her breasts during the audition, something often asked of adult film performers, even when the role requires little to no nudity (Ginger Lynn recounts just such a story involving the late Tony Scott in the Cleo/Leo episode of The Projection Booth; fast-forward to 2:59 for all of the depressing details). 

Though Maxine should be on top of the world, she isn't. If her acting dreams appear to be coming true, everything else is falling apart, because she soon attracts a stalker who knows exactly what went down in Texas in 1979 and plans to use that knowledge for some nefarious purpose that will not be revealed until the end of the film. In the meantime, this black leather-clad figure sets out to murder and desecrate everyone she cares about.

I won't say who bites it, but potential victims include her attorney (a toupéed Giancarlo Esposito), her peep show colleague (singer/songwriter Halsey with a pronounced Jersey accent), the director who fought to cast her (Elizabeth Debicki), her bubbly costar (Lily Collins), and her best friend (actor/musician Moses Sumney), a bespectacled video store clerk with a predilection for Judas Priest t-shirts. Even with his sex appeal tamped down, Sumney makes a vivid impression. I hope more acting lies in his future. 

Though Esposito's Teddy Knight, Esq. does what he can to keep Maxine safe, Debicki's Elizabeth Bender, the director, couldn't give a shit as to why she seems increasingly freaked out. And her star isn't the only one, since serial killer Robert Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, had women throughout San Francisco and Los Angeles on edge from 1984-1985 (local filmmaker Megan Griffiths made a very good telefilm for Lifetime about his reign of terror).

Sophisticated veneer aside, Elizabeth is just as ruthless as Maxine, and if all distractions can be kept at bay, she believes they'll have a hit on their hands. 

If I wasn't familiar with West's work, I might think he had a problem with female ambition, but I don't. Elizabeth isn't wrong that if she fucks up, she might not get to direct again. Studios in the 1980s were infamous for giving women exactly one shot--while providing as little support as possible--before dropping them if their film failed to perform. As the Bette Davis epigram at the outset makes clear, West is more interested in the way the pursuit of fame threatens to turn ordinary human beings, especially women, into monsters. If Elizabeth and Maxine are every bit as ambitious as Pearl, though, they aren't lunatics.

Nor is Maxine the same naïve, if not completely innocent woman she was at 26. She isn't just older and wiser, she's rougher and tougher. Suffering from PTSD, perhaps, but better able to withstand the vagaries of Hollywood.

The reveal of the stalker, a development involving bumbling detectives played by Bobby Canavale and Michelle Monaghan, doesn't come from out of nowhere, but I still found it unsatisfying, though it's consistent with West's work to date, since he's been exploring the ways faith, whether Christian (The Sacrament) or Satanic (The House of the Devil), can lead lost souls down some pretty twisted paths. It's an idea he introduced into the trilogy through the fire and brimstone preacher who appears on Pearl's TV in X. 

MaXXXine is more satisfying when it leans into its atmospheric, steam-rising-from-the-grates-afer-midnight slasher movie meets hair metal video aesthetic with nods to the spiked-heel pleasures of peak-era Dario Argento and Brian De Palma. 

It's most satisfying of all when Mia Goth gets to do her thing, whether Maxine is striking sparks off other characters or just talking to herself. 

There's a notion I've seen bouncing around social media that Ti West doesn't deserve her, a sure sign that the speaker isn't especially familiar with his work. He's a very good director, and he has been since the student shorts he made while studying filmmaking with Kelly Reichardt, who introduced him to actor/director/producer Larry Fessenden, who appears in MaXXXine as a security guard (and has his own horror film currently making the rounds).

It reminds me of a Film Comment profile of Gloria Grahame in which she stated, "Those men never directed me" about such heavy hitters as Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray. "Maybe," she concluded, "I just did it for myself."  

I seriously doubt Goth feels that way about West, with whom she has worked three times, so it's unfortunate that anyone would feel the need to diminish his abilities in order to elevate hers. Goth didn't write these parts or direct these performances. West capitalized on her considerable strengths, she rose to the occasion, and if anyone deserves stardom more than the title characters of these films: it's Mia Goth. But she didn't do it by herself. After all, it took an Elizabeth Bender to show the world what Maxine could do.

MaXXXine opens nationwide on Fri, July 5, and in Seattle at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Wed, July 3. Images from A24 by way of Variety (Mia Goth), the IMDb (Moses Sumney, Elizabeth Debicki, and Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive), and Etsy (Marilyn Chambers circa Behind the Green Door).