When last we left our girl Maxine Minx (Mia Goth, fierce and resplendent) chronologically, she had just driven away from a fundamentalist youth and over the skull of a serial killer who had slaughtered her friends and co-workers. She was on the road to Los Angeles to find her way to fame by any means necessary. Now, six years later, porn star Maxine is on the precipice of the next step in her career — an audition for a horror sequel called The Puritan II. It's not exceptionally respectable, but it's a gateway into mainstream cinema — like Not of This Earth and Cry-Baby were for Traci Lords, like Zombie 4: After Death was for Jeff Stryker. And the opening sequence’s Mulholland Drive-by-way-of-John Ford audition lets us know that Maxine’s got the chops. And certainly the will.
Ti West's surprise X prequel is now playing wide
But the problem with all this Hollywood attention is that activity always stirs up more activity. And soon enough the aftermath of the events we witnessed in 2022’s X starts to surface. An oleaginous Louisiana detective (Kevin Bacon, as if dredged in beignet sugar and cocaine) starts making some trouble around town, as does a mysterious gloved and hatted figure leaving a bloody trail of gruesomely ritualized murder, cutting through those around Maxine. And that’s the thing — she doesn’t have very many friends. Work colleagues, sure. But other than Leon (musician/filmmaker Moses Sumney, whose delivery of the phrase “ass sandwich” really should net him acting work for the rest of his life), there’s no one she can really even talk to, and even with him things are kept minimal. Maxine has ambition and scars as her ride-or-dies, so it’s hard for her to even know how to respond when things start getting ghoulish. And know that this is a horror film unafraid of serving up gore and unease in heaping piles.
Writer/director Ti West’s big breakthrough came with 2010’s The House of the Devil, a film that perfectly demonstrated that what a period piece needs is the proper cultivation of vibes (and an unequalled supporting Greta Gerwig performance). It’s a lesson that serves him well, as the 1985 Los Angeles of MaXXXine gets its vibes in place so well that as an audience member you start to resent how briskly paced the film is. You want that kettle to steep, and let all the weird and subtle flavors creep in. But if there’s one thing that keeps MaXXXine from quite reaching the greatness of its 2022 predecessors X and Pearl, it’s that it moves far too quickly for things to sink their hooks in.
There are some great images, and a couple of superb set pieces (especially two cat-and-mouse sequences that thwart expectations on several levels, the first of which had the crowd screaming and cheering). But this is a film that absolutely could have used another rewrite and another 20 minutes of runtime. The cast is full of interesting people, most of whom don’t even get enough time to register. Elizabeth Debicki as the hyper-focused director of The Puritan II fares the best, styled like Claudia Brücken and with a will that makes even our Maxine sit up and take notice, but even she could have benefited from more time in the narrative. Maybe there’s a longer version lurking about — if so, the public needs it. This is a film that yearns to be a classic American giallo riff, like The Killing Hour or A Stranger Is Watching. And it almost gets there. But hey, there’s no shame in being the Scream 3 of a series.
Goth is a star here, a supernova of attitude and cheekbones who takes no shit and slips through this film with a graceful sharpness that leaves paper cuts behind. Her emotional through-line works, and she delivers everything fans of the previous two films could want from her. But what’s interesting is that by the film’s timeline, in the present day, Maxine would be exactly the age Pearl was in X. It seems like the past four decades of American life might affect a would-be movie star like Maxine Minx in ... interesting ways. And for now, this scratches enough itches. It’s been what seems like ages since we had a horror franchise that could extend its tendrils into all manner of situations and concepts.
