I will not accept a misogynistic, self-congratulatory third movie I do not deserve.
Throughout the third movie in Ti West’s hit horror trilogy, the titular character, Maxine (Mia Goth), repeatedly expresses her motto, the phrase that drives her: “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” Sitting through the third act of this film, however, I was sitting there wondering what I had done to deserve this viewing experience. This is your official warning — this review will discuss spoilers from the film, so read at your own discretion!
MaXXXine is the cleverly named third movie in the X trilogy. Maxine Minx survived the horrors she was put through in what was dubbed “The Texas Porno Massacre” and is now trying to make it big in Hollywood. She finally lands a starring role in a horror picture only to find that some individual knows about her past and is out for revenge.
When watching the first two movies, X and Pearl, I acknowledged that my dislike of them was due to a matter of personal taste; I could see the film-making behind them both. Even though I was a little bored, I could see how each film served as a sort of microcosms for the old-school genres they fell in. X’s practical gore was something to be marveled, and its shocking moments felt earned given the plot and major themes of the movie, and Pearl was a technicolor descent into madness for the ages featuring an unforgettable performance from Mia Goth.
If X was an homage to Texas Chain Saw and Pearl brought back the magic of the Wizard of Oz, MaXXXine came across as more of an R-rated episode of Stranger Things. If I had a nickel for each ’80s montage — lights, Reagan, Coke bottles, news clips, and radio singles — I would probably end up with around 30 cents, which isn’t a lot, but it felt like torture sitting in a movie theater watching what was meant to be an homage turn into nothing more than an aesthetic overload. That’s not to take away from the visuals of the film — it was beautifully shot with lighting, cinematography, costumes, and sets that all matched the excessive opulence of Hollywood — but, like Hollywood, it felt like all that surface beauty was only there to cover up for a lack of anything underneath.
Plotline after plotline after plotline went by without any proper or satisfying resolution: Maxine experienced random flashbacks to her experiences in the first movie, but they did nothing to drive or alter her behavior in any way, making it seem like her trauma was just being used to add cheap scares and cheesy silhouettes-in-windows rather than actually something worthy of being explored.
The controversial callback to the real serial killer, the Night Stalker, also seemed to be there purely for aesthetic purposes, being mentioned in new reports as a reason for characters to “stay inside” or “avoid walking around at night,” which every character in the movie proceeded to do anyway. The mention of him didn’t amount to anything, either, aside from news footage stating that he was caught alongside this film’s actual killer, who was (predictably, with the opening segment of the movie featuring Maxine’s preacher dad cutting into talk about Satantic panic making it abundantly clear) Maxine’s father. I’m not going to get too much into that insane third act here because I feel like that is something a lot of people have touched on in their own reviews.
The use of the Night Stalker as a tool to place this movie into the real 1980s became even more harmful to me given the brutal violence against women throughout the film. While X put a huge emphasis on Maxine’s sex work, it fades into the background of this movie. Maxine, in fact, succeeds at multiple points throughout the film by turning on the women around her. She criticizes her coworkers in sex work for not fighting hard enough to get out of the field and for not “saving themselves” like she did during X’s massacre. The director of her movie, who is also meant to be a strong woman in the field, still makes Maxine shows her breasts in order to get the part, something that is played for jokes. A lot of her past as a sex worker, in fact, is played for jokes. It’s a running bit in the movie that increasingly older men, culminating in her father at the end, have watched her in porn and are not afraid to mention this to her face.
As with other male-directed horror slashers, women experience distinctly more sexualized violence than the men do. Two of Maxine’s coworkers are blindfolded and gagged, and the killer touches their faces intimately before stripping them naked and branding them. In fact, only the bodies of the female victims throughout the film are found naked. Perhaps this is a critique of how Hollywood sexualizes women, but as mentioned previously, this is not reflected at all by the writing and other messaging in the film. Maxine wins by turning on these women and sympathizing with the man who killed them. It’s also worth noting that the only man who experiences extreme, on-screen violence is a Black gay man who was also implied to be in sex work. And no, Kevin Bacon’s off-screen, blood-puddle death does not count here, as satisfying as that was. As a woman who is a huge fan of horror, I think watching this sort of sexualized torture of women play out on screen again and again is tired and uninteresting.
All in all, it felt like this film had no place in the trilogy. The plot of the movie was essentially Maxine running around Hollywood in various states of stress while she gets everything she wants with a shocking lack of pushback. Her grief at losing her friends is not explored at all, and it’s unclear to me if its brief appearances are meant to be legitimate. X and Pearl really did seem like sister films — homages to huge genres with parallel characters in Maxine and Pearl — but MaXXXine doesn’t seem to have any message at all. If Pearl is about the titular character fighting her whole life for something, getting rejected, and then killing people, MaXXXine is about the titular character fighting her whole life for something, succeeding, and then still killing people.
I should add that I thought there were some great performances in this movie. As everyone has mentioned, Kevin Bacon is a standout, but I also thought Giancarlo Esposito’s performance was excellent. Goth was great, but I feel like the writing dragged her performance down a little; there is only so much acting can save you when your character’s motivation is unclear and all you’re doing is pointlessly running back and forth across a movie set in a chase scene with no clear purpose.
Ultimately, MaXXXine appears to be a self-indulgent tribute from director and editor Ti West, laden with ’80s homages and exploitative content that fails to elevate its weak narrative. Despite its visual allure, the film’s poor writing and unsatisfying storylines overshadow any cinematic achievements. We, as an audience, deserved better than this disappointing conclusion.
★☆☆☆☆
2.7 out of 10
You can find MaXXXine in theaters!
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