Ti West’s MaXXXine is utterly confounding and insipid — it’s about women moving between sex work and the entertainment industry and about the abuses and pressures of those industries, while meanwhile robbing its characters of any autonomy or agency. If you come away with an ugly view of what the movie feels about any of this, it’s because it supports the idea directly and literally.
Likewise, it treats the audience like mindless sponges for genre concepts. Every piece of subtext is writ large, bludgeoning the audience and often spoken aloud, and every theme and motif are breezed past, as though genre movies only have the capacity for fragments of ideas, and nothing so cohesive as the unity of style and aesthetic.
There is nothing on MaXXXine’s mind that it does not show you explicitly and repeatedly, as though it’s designed as a second-screen, made-for-streaming model, and not for theatrical exhibition. It does not expect you to care or pay attention, or it would show you more and tell you less.
Ti West’s X series now contains a mediocre first film, a pretty great second film, and one of the most deflating denouements of any series you can think of. The pieces are in place and Mia Goth is occasionally allowed to act, although her character seems to just be a passenger of her own life, as much along for the ride as we are, but probably far less frustrated, as she’s sort of cruising by and we’re waiting for her to really take action and not just be shuffled through subtext, story arcs, and a conclusion, because movies often have those pieces, not because any of this is designed around advancing any idea within the movie.
By the end, the slate is even more blank than where it began, as we get an over manufactured style exercise in implanting Ti West’s Hollywood with anything worth thinking about. And certainly, there’s something you can come up with, on your own and apart from the movie, about the better way to design the story and what it would mean about the historic exploitation of women in Hollywood, where a story is wrapped around the themes of the movies of the time — this time ‘80s Hollywood — and maybe it means something, reflects some thematic value inward. Is made for a reason besides to be sold to an audience, on top of two movies we already have.
Where we end up is with nothing new, a reductive addition to an already shaky foundation for a franchise. A total non-starter of a third movie that references and looks at horror but is unwilling to engage with any of these ideas in a meaningful way on its own terms. Shame, as the stable of talent is there — Mia Goth can hold the camera’s attention, Halsey makes a fun appearance, Kevin Bacon is doing something, and Elizabeth Debicki is tall — but the movie never arrives at anything like the well-defined upgrade of Pearl (2022) or even the aesthetically curious X (2022). When the movie cuts back to events from those movies, it also should convince you to watch those, instead.
At its foundation, MaXXXine is so deeply uncommitted to its premise, you can hardly tell what kind of horror movie it wants to be. Is it a slasher that forgot to be one? A half-cooked giallo? An exploitation movie with a copaganda ending? Choose your own adventure.