During the pandemic, Ti West shot two films back-to-back in New Zealand that benefitted from a tight focus: X was a slasher variant carving up an amateur porn shoot on a remote rural farm, while prequel Pearl dug memorably deeper into the tormented backstory of the earlier film's monster-in-chief. Everything you need to know about this trilogy's third entry, the sequel MaXXXine, can be deduced from its expansive opening credits. Firstly, West is back in the US; secondly, he now has actors clamoring to work with him, having seen a) those modestly budgeted horror ventures succeed at the box office, and b) the transformative effect this filmmaker had on leading lady Mia Goth, a once-drifting indie It girl thrust into the awards conversation for her tenacious performance as Pearl. Goth returns for the new film as Maxine Minx, bloodied survivor of X, rejoined in a transitional moment in mid-1980s Los Angeles, leaving the adult entertainment in which she first made her name behind in order to take up a scream-queen role in The Puritan II, theatrically bound sequel to a straight-to-video slasher hit. Around her, MaXXXine demonstrates far more ambition than its predecessors: Maxine's continued upward progress is framed within the moral panics of the 1980s entertainment industry (so-called video nasties, Tipper Gore lambasting Prince songs in Congress), dark rumblings of Satanism, the legends of the Hollywood Boulevard, and the murderous deeds of the real-life serial killer dubbed The Night Stalker, on the rampage here even before Maxine finds herself being pursued by a figure who knows exactly what our gal's done to get where she is. As a result, the focus is split and scattered. We spend what feels like three-quarters of MaXXXine hustling around town, taking meetings, being introduced to new and varyingly shady characters. Nothing is allowed to be as still or potent as the closing image of Pearl, which set a static camera running on a face riding a rollercoaster of emotions.
It comes as a slight letdown, because when he allows himself time to concentrate and carve scenes out, West again proves a better director of horror than most. MaXXXine's most unnerving setpiece arrives early on: the heroine freaking out after being covered with the liquid rubber used to make headcasts for make-up effects. (The scene may have had its genesis in the latex Goth had to don for her dual role in X.) And clearly West enjoys working with varied, capable performers: we get colourful supporting turns from Elizabeth Debicki as a horror tyro who takes a hands-on approach to gore, Kevin Bacon as a sleazy blackmailer, and Giancarlo Esposito as Maxine's rep at the amusingly named TNA Agency. (West is often funny with his details: witness Maxine stomping into work at an airport-adjacent stripjoint called The Landing Strip.) Yet you feel too many subplots jostling for prominence between the film's outsized quotation marks - you can practically smell the deleted scenes, the long nights in the edit suite - and the lacquered Eighties homage works against anything genuinely horrific: it's hard to be knowing (as MaXXXine is) and shocking (as MaXXXine wants to be) at the same time. Like Greta Gerwig, whom he directed in 2009's House of the Devil, West began his career on the fringes of the shuffling mumblecore movement. MaXXXine might be regarded as this filmmaker's Barbie, repositioning an established platinum-blonde heroine in a new and even more expensive doll's house. (For the Dream House, read the dream factory.) West has fun rerouting everybody to the Bates Motel and setting scenes to Frankie Goes to Hollywood à la Brian De Palma, but he's too often having to play traffic cop: his dialogue sounds newly hurried and on-the-nose, and everything collapses in a heap after a botched final-reel reveal. Goth, at least, continues to evoke the angelic and demonic simultaneously; her Maxine, at once American dream and nightmare, finally gets where she longs to be. Yet the intensity that so distinguished her work in Pearl dissipates here amid a surfeit of postmodern clutter. It often happens when folks go to Hollywood: they get distracted, and some lose their edge.
MaXXXine is now showing in selected cinemas.
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