The will-to-power narrative in MaXXXine is something we’ve seen before. You know, character wants to be a star, character goes through some shit (which may run contrary to audience sympathy), and at some point, character looks at him or herself in the mirror and says “You’re a star.” Mia Goth as Maxine and Pearl is something we’ve seen before too – a total of now four times over three movies. She played both roles in writer-director-editor Ti West’s 2022 film X, and just the latter in West’s later-in-2022 prequel Pearl, the first of which was quite good and the second of which was great. But they say familiarity breeds contempt, and by the second half of MaXXXine, we’ve gotten part of the way there.

The first half, though, is a rip-roaring time. Maxine drove away, mostly intact, from what the newspaper headlines called “The Texas Porn Star Massacre,” which made up the majority of the film X. Some five to ten years later, she’s already had a celebrated career as an adult film star called Maxine Minx in Los Angeles, but on the other side of 30, she’s looking to go legitimate. She auditions for the sequel to a horror movie called The Puritan, which will be directed by a tough director who wants to bring art to the B movie, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki). She gets the part, but no sooner does that happen than two close friends and co-workers turn up dead in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, pentagrams branded into their flesh.

The police (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale) think it’s a serial killer known as the Night Stalker – but then maybe have second thoughts when another acquaintance of Maxine’s is brutally murdered. Through mysterious video tapes arriving at her door and menacing visits from a private investigator (Kevin Bacon) with a client who prefers to remain anonymous, it becomes clear Maxine has some role to play in all this, the killer leading up to some grand finale that ties in with her escaping that Texas farmhouse with blood on her hands.

If this plot synopsis doesn’t sound like what you were expecting from MaXXXine, that’s part of the problem. X and Pearl were both clearly horror movies, but MaXXXine doesn’t have that same feel – possibly because of the detectives popping up every five minutes. You got a serial killer, it could be a horror or it could be something else. But you got a serial killer and detectives, and it’s a serial killer movie, which is too little of an offshoot from the police procedural.

You probably wouldn’t actually describe West’s third movie in the trilogy that way, largely because it’s not told from the perspective of the detectives. But even with the always intriguing and frankly unnerving Goth at the centre of the movie, it’s still dangerously close to a far more conventional type of movie than West would have usually picked for himself. And the final reveal of what’s driving this killer is one of the more tired themes of films in this genre, or films adjacent to it.

Now the good. West creates an incredible sense of place here, recreating the seedy strip clubs that dotted Hollywood Boulevard or clustered around LAX in the 1980s, with all the slime and sleaze that entails, both physically and morally. (The film takes place in 1985.) Underpinned by an immersive use of period music – choices that are one step removed from the most obvious choice to score the moment – these scenes situate us in this era perfectly, and create a mood around our beguiling and unnerving heroine. As always, West knows what to do with a camera.

The work Goth is doing here is not as good as in Pearl, where you almost feel as though West pushed her to the places that Stanley Kubrick pushed Shelley Duvall on The Shining. (Rest in peace.) The psycho that character turned into by the end was a tough act to follow, made all the more complex by the pity we felt for her. Maxine is not that character, though, and I don’t know that West really gets us to sympathise with her like we did sympathise with her in X. Through the aforementioned will to power, she’s hardened herself into a place where her delusions are a lot less charming. The point may be that Maxine and Pearl are one in the same, but if that’s the case, West’s commitment to delivering that theme is absent. If they are, then what is he really saying anyway, about ambition or anything else?

In fact, what is West saying? The characters in two of these movies are porn actors, at least some of them, and in each film he sets up characters in opposition to them as represenatives of religion and the conservative right’s “Moral Majority” of that period. If he’s empowering sex work, that’s not clear enough as a theme rather than just a general stance. The film also gets caught up a bit in alluding to Hollywood history, as the director and Maxine drive to the Bates Motel movie set on the Universal backlot, and Bacon’s character – after getting righteously beaten by Maxine in one of two great scenes where he gets his – wears a nose bandage at one point in what can only be an homage to Chinatown. But to what end?

The theme of “what it takes to make it Hollywood” seems a little shallow for someone like West, who makes glorious mayhem when he isn’t really trying to mean anything, and may struggle a bit when he tries to mean something. Which brings us back to the star who looks at themselves in the mirror and says they’re a star. Even when Dirk Diggler did that in Boogie Nights, it already didn’t feel like the most trenchant commentary on the industry. And really, it’s just a coincidence that they are both porn stars – unless this was another one of West’s homages. MaXXXine earns a mild recommendation, but it would have earned a bigger one if it stuck to not really trying to mean anything.

 

MaXXXine is currently playing in cinemas.