Make no mistake, Mia Goth is a “fucking movie star” and her last outing as Maxine Minx in Maxxxine, Ti West’s exhilarating conclusion to their X trilogy cements that fact in blood, gristle and gore, smears it on the Bowie coke mirror, and strobes it up in neon lights across Hollywood Boulevard.
Having survived the “Texas Porn Star Massacre” from the original X, Maxine is now an established porn actress, strutting imperiously through Los Angeles looking to get her break in the horror sequel, Puritan 2. However, when her friends and co-workers in the sex industry are murdered, Maxine feels her past start to suffocate her.
Maxine crushes the audition, drawing on her past trauma, “I’ve seen the devil… stalking me like a spectre from the past… haunting my dreams, my nightmares. I can feel his power inside of me… transforming into something vengeful. Something evil. Forcing me to do terrible, awful, murderous things.”
In turn, Goth forces the camera into her orbit, and we are mesmerised, hypnotised, forgetting the layers upon layers of meta meaning, enjoying those ‘awful, murderous things’. Goth is Maxine. Maxine is Goth. Ti West could be beaming subliminal messages into our skulls and we wouldn’t know or care.
Goth has it. What it is hovers incorporeal between the screen, camera, and the audience. At times Sissy Spacek’s freckles seem superimposed across Goth’s face, at others Shelly Duvall’s eyes haunt Goth’s stare. There’s a fearless abandon about Goth as Maxine, a constant clenching of teeth that could simultaneously rip out a jugular and bathe in the arterial spray or burst into a supa-nova smile and blind everyone into submission. Goth’s truest comparison is Jennifer Jason Leigh, who made her early career in sleazy low-budget horrors, thrillers and indie flicks like The Hitcher, Miami Blues, and Last Exit to Brooklyn, both actors are equally diminutive and ferocious. Dismiss them at your peril.
We forget that we’re watching the daughter of a Brazilian mother and Canadian father, brought up in Brazil, England, and Canada acting as a southern hick who in turn auditions for the Puritan 2 using her violent lived experience to get the role, whilst burying her sordid past to avoid the electric chair.
Throw in the fact that The X trilogy is a star-making turn for Goth just like The Puritan 2 is for Maxine; the blend of vulnerability and fierce ambition, capturing the character’s evolution from the naive dreamer in X to the hardened survivor in Maxxxine is nothing short of astonishing.
Unlike the laser sharp faux 80s milieu of Nicolas Winding Refn, Ti West shoots the neon squalor of downtown Los Angeles as if through the lens of a pair of five-dollar sunglasses. There is a grubby realism to the day-glo fantasy, and the 80s song cuts West chooses for his soundtrack, once so familiar to the Generation X audience are now beyond contempt for the A24 savvy Gen Z moviegoers. ZZ Top’s Gimmie All Your Lovin’ is a perfect heartbeat for Maxine to bully her way through the opening credits, or the sheer decadence of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome cascading through a night club reminiscent of William Friedkin’s Cruising strikes aural mastery into the proceedings.
As Maxine is pursued by Kevin Bacon’s private investigator, a Gerald Scarfe take on JJ Gittes, through the various levels of hell the nightclub represents, Welcome to the Pleasuredome’s sonics are incrementally reduced by each door shut, and room entered by Maxine. The marriage of sound design and direction is next level, as if Holly Johnson’s arch delivery of the lyrics is so powerful, that Scouse take on Vincent Price’s laugh so iconic, they keep trying to force a way through, “We’re a long way from home” indeed. Is the case made for Welcome to the Pleasuredome to be the best track of the 1980s period?
Maxxxine is more than just a fitting conclusion to a trilogy; it’s a bold, meta statement about the power of resilience and the price of ambition. It is a film that challenges the conventions of the horror genre while paying homage to its roots. Ti West has crafted a cinematic experience that is as thought-provoking as it is thrilling, circling back to elements of celebrity and cultism explored in his criminally underseen take on the Jonestown Massacre, The Sacrament.
West and Goth have created one the greatest and enduring cinematic partnerships over the last 20 years. It would be criminal if they don’t team up again soon.