Mia Goth Ascends to the Highest Level of Scream Queen in ‘MaXXXine’

There’s a moment early in Ti West’s horror-trilogy finale MaXXXine where Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), a mid-level porn star pushing 35, nails the audition of her life. Asked to recite a short monologue for a horror movie called The Puritan II, Maxine abruptly switches from her Texan drawl to a quiet intensity, seemingly taking to heart the stage direction that the words be spoken straight to the camera and (wink, wink) “through her trauma.” Before and after, she has the bravado of a future star; “through her trauma,” she seems deceptively open and terrified.

Goth isn’t the first star to pull this trick. The actress playing an actress whose on-a-dime emotional transformations feel both ironically technical and as if they could be using flawless technique to cover her own wounds was covered as recently as 2022, when Margot Robbie performed a similar routine in Babylon. That was also the year of X, the first installment in the trilogy that MaXXXine finishes, which introduced Maxine as an aspiring adult-film star, hungry for her big break and accepting that having sex on film would have to do. But despite the familiarity of the audition scene’s auto-critique of acting, practically its own cliché by this point, Goth’s scream-queen bona fides bring something extra Maxine’s switch. The usual dynamic has to do with the visible manipulation – the extra space before and after the big performance that we’re not supposed to see – and wondering whether this makes the subject’s talent brilliant, or vaguely sociopathic. Goth pushes that question further: Is Maxine the final girl because of her will to survive whatever horrors are thrown at her, or the final girl because she’s willing to kill anyone else still standing?

Technically, Maxine’s body count isn’t that high – not slasher high, anyway. In the gruesomely satisfying finale of X, she dispatched the elderly couple – including Pearl, also played by Goth – who had just murdered her entire film crew. Pearl paused Maxine’s story to focus on the killer’s origin as a frustrated wannabe performer, with a pleading desperation emanating from those widened eyes. MaXXXine picks up six years after the events of X; Maxine has escaped her past, even managed to avoid any connection to what the press calls (wink, wink) the Texas Porn Star Massacre, and makes a living for herself in the porn industry. She still has her eyes on bigger prizes, though, and won’t let anything get in her way. West doesn’t push her into full-on Pearl-style mania, but she does react with raw instinct when she thinks her career might be on the line. Maxine doesn’t kill an anonymous creep who comes after her with a knife, for example, but what she does instead might be harder to explain to the papers.

A genuine killer also appears to be stalking Maxine, with the help of a sleazy private detective (Kevin Bacon, chewing the neon scenery), just as she gets that big break. After nailing the aforementioned audition, she has her chance to work for imposing, exacting horror director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), who wants the Puritan sequel to be a “B-picture with ‘A’ ideas.” (Debicki’s dialogue is often regrettably on-the-nose; she’s also charged with pointing out that the Psycho motel on the Universal backlot is, in fact, the Psycho motel — or, specifically, the Psycho II motel.) If Maxine can just dodge the local police, the private detective, and whatever masked killer may or may not be roaming the streets of Los Angeles, maybe she can become a genuine ’80s scream queen.

Goth, of course, is already there, albeit with a more arthouse edge. In addition to the X trilogy, she’s also appeared in A Cure for Wellness, the Suspiria remake, and Infinity Pool, cultivating the image of unhinged commitment and darkness worthy of her surname. Compared to Infinity Pool, her work in MaXXXine is downright subdued. The obvious choice might be to turn Maxine into a monster in the pursuit of stardom, All About Eve with keys strategically placed between her knuckles. West’s film is more elusive than that, even when it seems more thematically schematic than either X (which has a just-about perfect mixture of slasher-movie tribute and unexpected grace notes) or Pearl (which has moments that feel half-cocked, befitting a movie that was conceived, written, and hastily shot during quarantine). It’s almost as if he’s come to love Maxine, and Goth, too much to let her descend too far into hell. For all of the movie’s glorious splatter, red lighting, beautiful costuming, spiral-staircase De Palma homages, and VHS textures, it doesn’t feel truly sleazy or unhinged. There are guardrails, somehow.

Within those constraints, Goth makes Maxine a strangely touching figure. She’s not as committed a movie buff as her video-store pal Leon (Moses Sumney), or, seemingly, as enraptured by cinema as her old nemesis Pearl; when she watches The Puritan on VHS, it’s like she’s trying to find the hidden portal that will transport her to the next level of fame. When she listens to Bender’s lectures, she goes meek and obedient as a child (at least when she’s not distracted by the haunting visage of the elderly woman whose head she ran over with a truck). In one of the movie’s most memorable sequences, Maxine submits to having a plaster cast taken of her head, and as she’s covered in goop, trapped in the darkness, she’s terrifyingly alone with her thoughts. A lack of introspection is not necessarily the easiest quality to play, and Goth – at one point seen furiously slashing a highlighter through her lines in a script – does a terrific job speaking “through” the trauma West jokingly refers to in that early scene. She conveys how Maxine experiences horror first and foremost as a series of personal obstacles. It seems entirely possible that Pearl haunts her not because of the violence of their encounter, but because of the mortality she brazenly displays.

As much as West himself obviously loves movies – MaXXXine tours the Universal backlot with great enthusiasm, no homage too silly or out of place – his X trilogy seems most interested in how people see them as a means to an end, with the characters progressively searching for some greater power or permanence beyond making art. (It’s the semi-amateur pornographers of X who seem purest at heart, while MaXXXine’s ultimate villain has something of an if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em philosophy.) Goth was celebrated for a climactic monologue in Pearl where she spills her guts about her character’s dreams and disappointments, but here she may be doing something harder: She coils up her trauma, forever saving up for her big break.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.