MaXXXine, the last star

It's incredible how the character of Mia Goth has finally become a star in the film where, paradoxically, she shines the least. MaXXXine is the third and final chapter of the trilogy started in 2022 by Ti West (first with X - A Sexy Horror Story, then with Pearl in 2023), a parabola that concludes with a thriller that chooses to belong to the horror genre, this time in a police key. The core of the project remains unchanged: a B-movie meticulously studied by the director and screenwriter (as well as editor), which with the latest work explodes into an analysis of the horror genre, distorted and sublimated. The events pick up from the end of X, leaving Pearl relegated to memory, with the young Maxine Minx (Goth) in 1985 becoming a porn professional after leaving a trail of corpses behind her in her previous life in Texas. Transferred to Hollywood, she finds work in the adult industry and believes the big leap is possible. Preferably not like what happened to Black Dahlia, the nickname of Elizabeth Short, who, dreaming of a career in show business, found death in 1946 in the hills of Los Angeles, becoming an icon of perdition in the golden age of Hollywood show business.

For Maxine, the danger of meeting a bad end is high. A criminal prowls the alleys of the city of angels, renamed Night Stalker, constantly hunting for victims to kill. Yet nothing seems to stop the protagonist: neither a murderer, nor the producers who would not want a porn face as the protagonist of their film, nor the dark private investigator who begins to follow her. A Kevin Bacon full of life philosophies and a mocking laugh. And a suit, including a bandage on the nose, that makes him a leaner, more agitated version of Jack Nicholson's Jack Gittes in Chinatown. Despite the tones of the B movie style films, which from the beginning West took as inspiration for his triptych on the desire for success in Hollywood (practically a dirtier and less sugar-coated version of the "crazy and dreamers" of La La Land), the rhythm of MaXXXine seems to belong to nothing but the personality of its protagonist. Intransigent, determined, the young promise of cult films - like the first one she will shoot, the sequel to a horror work, The Puritan 2 - has a precise goal, knows how to achieve it, and doesn't care about the rest. And maybe it's the same Ti West, with the massive collaboration of Goth (producer and screenwriter from Pearl onwards) who, having reached the end of one of the most shameless trilogies of our times, digs his heels in and decides it's time to reconstruct and amalgamate everything he tried to express with his three films. A final summa, less explosive, but more detailed.

Video stores, bad horror (but beautiful precisely for this reason), undercover detectives with smoke-worn teeth exuding alcohol beyond the screen, plainclothes cops with badges prominently displayed on their belts speeding through American streets hunting for killers and injustices: these are the influences that Ti West decided to incorporate into his latest creation. The history of cinema - personal for the author, but also chronological and analogical - is clear from the first shot. In every sense. A black background, a gate that is swung open and slowly becomes a shaft of light showing us what is "beyond" the screen. If in The Searchers, whose opening continues to populate all the films released since 1956, the character of Martha Edwards (played by Dorothy Jordan) left her house to step into the Old Wild West, in MaXXXine the protagonist "breaks through" the wall and steps into a lit spot to claim her place in the cinema world. Martha led us to an unexplored frontier. Maxine, on the other hand, moves forward, entering a Hollywood studio warehouse for the audition that will change her life. Both are destined to be part of the star-studded cinematic panorama, only MaXXXine has reversed the route. While X and Pearl resolutely told their stories, mixing killings and sex - the very elements that, from the 1970s onwards, would awaken the curiosity of viewers - the third film by the Wilmington director chooses a more relaxed pace and the complete absence of grand scenes. The film is homogeneous in its tense calm, in the way it does not press the viewer, just as it does not press the characters. The sequences seem like theatrical paintings; they have a continuity and a plot that links them, but they aim more to establish an imagery than to seek a story progression.

In MaXXXine, the horror imagery becomes a fresco. It's no coincidence that in one scene the protagonist is chased by Bacon's investigator through various sets of the film studios. They change locations during the cat-and-mouse chase, and even the music suddenly plays a completely different melody, choosing the suitable accompaniment for the scenery that serves as their backdrop until they reach the reconstruction of the house from Psycho. It's also no coincidence that inside the building, Maxine evokes the elderly Pearl from the first film so similar to Mrs. Bates, or that, even in geriatric clothes, she is always played by scream queen Mia Goth (and to think that, in this 2024, the real horror of the year seems to be Longlegs by Oz Perkins, son of actor Anthony, who played Norman/Norma Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's work). Even at the end of the film, the timing and cadence of the entertainment remain strangely relaxed, unusually placid. In the meantime, there have been brutal murders, returns from the past, recordings that have captured actions, nudity from which it is impossible to escape, and motivational speeches from a splendid Elizabeth Debicki in the role of the director of The Puritan 2. Along with a scene that recalls the quintessential daring cult, the film that seems mandatory to mention when talking about sex, Hollywood, death, and dreams of glory: if Craig Wasson as Jake Scully ventured into a nightclub among exposed breasts, sodomy, and latex to the notes of Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood in Body Double by Brian De Palma, Maxine acts as bait in a disco to the notes of Welcome To The Pleasuredome, also by the British group, during a wild dance scene.

The unexpected sluggish pace also affects the film's conclusive reference, the turning point in Eyes Wide Shut style that should give meaning to everything - with Goth, the pillar and embodiment of the trilogy itself, also revealing that she went to a real party in line with the Kubrickian gathering to prepare for the film. Therefore MaXXXine, with the necessary bloodshed and the twist of fame that can come from the most unpredictable and bloody publicity - we know very well by now, being that true crime is today the genre par excellence among films, miniseries, and podcasts - leaves more distance than the films that preceded it. With a protagonist who can say she has tasted fame, living a life on par with what she deserves, as her father always told her. She has become, therefore, a star. But it cost her everything. As it will cost her to accept that, for the grand finale, the light of MaXXXine shone dimmer, though always magnetic and intriguing.