MaXXXine is more coda than last chapter in Ti West's trilogy

Let's be clear: Ti West's X and Pearl are masterpieces of new horror cinema. The latter remains one of the very few prequel-sequels that renders its predecessor more meaningful, more nuanced and like X, arguably pushed the genre forward in equally unexpected ways.

I better pause here to give a HUGE SPOILER WARNING for, at least, the first two films, and possibly the third. 

Watching MaXXXine, I was struck by several general responses. One, West, his art directing team of Jason Zev Cohen and Jason Baldwin Stewart, production designer Jason Kisvarday and his set decorator wife Kelsi Ephraim, costume designer Mari-On Ceo,  and cinematographer Eliot Rockett evoke a period specific milieu (1985) equal to that of the previous films. The only constants here are West himself and Rockett. i mention the rest of the team because you feel the grit and seediness of mid-80s Los Angeles as its own character. 

I would also add that MaXXXine may be the most fun of the three films; it's the lightest in tone and while as dark in terms of violence and genuinely horrific set-ups, it retains a kind of also period specific cartoonish. A scene with a dismembered body falling out in pieces from a suitcase is downright Grand Guignol slapstick. It's not necessarily played for laughs, but I found a rueful grin cut across my face, particularly when Maxine herself follows the luggage's trajectory in visible disbelief.

The film also feels slighter with the absence of the previous two's thematic rumination on age, youth, passion, and the need for fulfillment. MaXXXine takes a look at ambition, how our origins shape us, and the work required to find some sense of closure on the one hand and to be able to move on from our traumas on the other. But for all that, it feels almost more like a palate cleanser after the heavy meats that the previous two presented.

The cast is also more stacked with recognizable names; Bobby Cannavale and Michele Monaghan as detectives investigating a series of Nightcrawler copycat crimes with Maxine at the center, Elizabeth Debicki as Elizabeth Bender, the director of The Puritan II, the movie that will provide Maxine with the potential to cross over to mainstream film. Giancarlo Esposito plays Maxine's agent whose past may be as murky as hers. Lily Collins and Halsey are on hand for some additional support. Oh, and Kevin Bacon shows up as one of the more risible figures in a movie this year, as a PI hired to find Maxine and deliver her to his boss. I love Kevin Bacon and there are references dropped throughout the film as Easter egg homages to him but his gumshoe is played so broad that I get the feeling he's meant to support the lightness of touch throughout the movie.

And of course, there's Mia Goth. Across three films, she delivers masterwork performances as Maxine in X and MaXXXine and as Pearl in X and Pearl. She's awed me in supporting character roles in Guadagigno's Suspiria and Brandon Cronenberg's Infinity Pool and others, but in these three films she is a force of nature and naturalist acting the like of which you would expect from her more established contemporaries but that elevates all three films (and particularly the third) to match West's vision.

A brief recap may be in order for the uninitiated. We meet Maxine Mynx (née Miller) in X as a pornstar who along with her boyfriend director and the cast and limited crew (two people) have secured an old barn in rural Texas to shoot what the visionary director feels will revolutionize the genre. Think a backwoods Boogie Nights, kind of (not really, but it's the best I can come up with). West takes his time and establishes the characters as well-rounded and sympathetic, though there is a frisson of jealousy and the irritation that develops on sets of all types. The owner of the property they're on is Howard, a World War I veteran who maintains the place with his wife Pearl. 

There is a remarkable, somewhat anitphonal approach to the agedness of Howard and Pearl and the youth of the rest of the cast. Pearl still feels immense desire and passion but her husband doesn't seem capable of reciprocating and West positions his reluctance as a stated apprehension about the possibility of a heart attack should he indulge that might just be a polite excuse for the possible repugnance he feels toward his wife's body. I'm not completely swayed by that latter take; they do love each other and they do consummate their ardor at one point (or another way of looking at it is that Pearl simply fucks him).

By contrast, the younger people are porn professionals (well, all but Jenna Ortega's Lorraine who is part of the crew but eventually submits herself to overcoming her apparent prudishness by taking part in the film). The "furious jumping" (I will always be indebted to Yorgos Lanthimos for that phrase and we should all make an effort to spread it around) begins and along the way, we discover that Howard and Pearl aren't pleased with the humpery. But here's where the rationale deviates from the standard flasher trope of sex=death in the genre. 

Pearl, likely more than Howard is angry at the sheer effrontery of youthful beauty, of how freely they express desire. She may be further resentful in the face of Howard's reluctance and/or a conflation of all this. Howard comes across as the more traditionally moralistic condemnatory. However we parse this, the body count begins mounting at the halfway mark. 

There is a breach of trust when one of the party ventures out to poke around against Howard's stated wishes and as each person is dispatched down to leaving Maxine as the final girl in a reversal of the trope that final girls are always virgins, we see Howard and Pearl finish people with something like senior glee. Along the way, there is a haunted. loaded scene with Pearl and Maxine in bed as Pearl lays down with Maxine and caresses her in a kind of cinematic memento mori mise-en-scène. In some ways, Maxine are not so dissimilar; both were driven, beautiful women with dreams. We learn cursorily, that Pearl's dreams never bloomed. Thus, there is an additional layer to her jealousy/anger and even hatred of Maxine. Conversely, Maxine finds Pearl repulsive.

Along the way, Howard does suffer a heart attack when he fires a shotgun and the story draws to a close when Maxine runs over Pearl's head as she drives off. 

“Everything written for women seems to fall into just three categories: ingénues, mothers, or gorgons…”  -- Joan Crawford

X requires additional viewing; I actually felt as though I was watching a feature from 1979 that was more self-aware and already deconstructing the slasher genre but also that ably folded into it resonances of Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in its consideration of the treatment of desire and passion in seniors and how often people recoil from the very idea that people of advanced years might still be sexual beings.

It's also not just that it's thematically rich or full of ideas; I like the characters. I want to spend more time with them and I'm even drawn to Howard and Pearl the more I think about what their lives might have been like since the Great War.

Thankfully, West shot Pearl in short-order after completing X and provided us with a fuller portrait of the titular figure. It's a properly gorgeous film. Rockett's cinematography is all saturated Technicolor, vast expansives and some of the most beautiful shots of an actress I've ever seen as we burrow deeper into Pearl's massively disturbed psyche.

It's 1918, the first World War is winding down, but the Spanish Flu is raging across the land and Pearl is living at home on the family farm established by her German immigrant parents. Her father is debilitated from the effects of the epidemic and her mother, played with precise German strictness by Tandi Wright, is doing her best to keep the farm afloat and Pearl on the straight and narrow. This far, far more easily said than done. 

Pearl is a seething mass of exposed passion-soaked ganglia. She's all id and desire and in some very critical ways Pearl is to her mother Ruth here as Maxine is to Pearl in X. Pearl wants to out of the stultifying rural life she's stuck in; she feels abandoned by her husband Howard who is serving overseas and from whom she's heard little. She is convinced her mother hates her. She doesn't, but her reason for being hard on Pearl makes sense.

Pearl has this unnerving tendency to just kill animals and feed them to Theda, an alligator in the pond on their property. Theda's name is an indication of how badly Pearl wants to be in pictures and make a name for herself; another mirror image of Maxine but one in which the image of one is succeeding where the other failed. 

Pearl's failure or her crushed ambition stems from losing a dance audition to her sister-in-law Mitsy, a blonde, beautiful girl who bears the brunt of Pearl's confession of everything she's done (at which point in the movie had been slaughtering animals willy-nilly, more or less accidentally killing her mother, smothering her father, and pitchforking to death the projectionist of the town's movie palace (David Corenswet, our next Clark Kent/Kal-El in James Gunn's Superman film due out next year...oh, he'll be fine, I think). The pitchfork execution finds its echo in Pearl's dispatching one of the crew in X, by the way.

Pearl's a lot. Her mother was strict with her because, as she told Pearl before she caught fire and Pearl used boiling water to put the fire out (I really don't think that was intentional; even Pearl recognized she wasn't the brightest took in the kit...or something), she had seen what Pearl did when she thought no one was looking. She saw the animal killings and knew that Pearl wasn't stable. She feared for what would happen if Pearl found here way into the world and all she could see when she looked at her daughter was her own failure. It's a brutal sequence that culminates in her slapping Pearl and Pearl returning the slap while Ruth's dress catches alight from the fire burning behind her. 

In a film replete with some of the most grisly special effects, though, it's the words that convey the utter sense of despair at Ruth and Pearl's hearts. Everyone in the film seems to want something better for themselves. Mitsy even wants to get out of town and she comes from money. Alas, poor Mitsy. As Pearl comes out of her fugue state where she confesses all of her misdeeds, Mitsy begins to flee fearfully chased by Pearl wielding an axe and dispatching her. 

West folds Hitchcock into his homage along with Sirk when Howard returns from the war and enters the house only to see one more horror that surely traumatized him as much as anything he might have seen on the battlefield. Sitting around a set dinner table with a maggot-infested rotting pig pre-roasted and gifted to Ruth by Mitsy's mother a couple of days earlier as the centerpiece and other sides of dubious substances is what's left of Ruth and Pearl's father and Pearl welcoming Howard back home. The camera slowly zooms in and holds on Goth's ridiculously grinning, unhinged face. We are left to fill in the major gaps of what transpired at that farm over the ensuing sixty years before Maxine and her friends show up.

I keep turning X and Pearl over in my mind as approaches to harder emotional questions in the same way that for the past fifteen or more years, we've been introduced to richer, deeper thematic structures in the contemporary horror scene. There is no dearth of thoughtful films of the genre that are more explicit in framing psychological trauma, mental health issues, and more in a way that renders them more comprehensible than might otherwise be the case. Horror provides a visceral and graphic platform by which to visualize the seeds and elements of dis-ease that are at the center of many narratives. X and Pearl, like It Follows or The Babadook, are sterling examples of this. MaXXXine? Well, as I mentioned above, it's a slighter work.

That doesn't mean, however, that it's not good. On the contrary, it's very, very good. Taken on its own, it does resolve how Maxine became who she is and how she deals with the challenges before her (she may be one of the toughest cookies in cinema, regardless of genre) and how, unlike Pearl, she really does understand the importance of putting in the work to get where she needs to go. As a character study, Pearl is nicely self-contained, but I wonder what it would be like to watch it without having seen the previous films.

I don't know what's next for West or Goth, but I suspect more surprises are in store. As strong as these movies are, I wonder what a Ti West non-horror flick would look like. I really feel like Goth is going to prove herself worthy of pantheon sooner than later. Her next roles are in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and in Marvel's Blade, a beleaguered production that currently doesn't have a director (though both films are to be released next year). 

Random notes

MaXXXine opens with Maxine putting her cigarette out on Theda Bara's star on Hollywood Boulevard, a callback to Pearl naming the alligator after the silent queen.

Kevin Bacon's tape over his nose and white suit struck me as echoes of Jake Gittes in Chinatown.

Not a hundred percent sure it's the same routine, but we see a young Maxine dancing in film and talking to her father, but I think the routine is the same one that Pearl uses for her audition in the previous film.

Is there a greater homage than actually incorporating the Bates Motel and the Bates mansion from Psycho in your film? So, so cool.