Mia Goth Will Almost Convince You MaXXXine Has Something to Say

Photo: Justin Lubin/A24

Ti West’s X trilogy isn’t a series of films so much as it is a stack of them. The three features feel like they’re best considered when layered on top of one another, like transparent cels that only add up to a whole image in combination, and that play as incomplete fragments when looked at alone. His franchise may jump back and forth through time, from the 1970s of X to the 1910s of Pearl and on to the 1980s in its latest installment, MaXXXine. But thematically it stays put, turning over the same basic elements — sex, violence, showbiz, and the hypocrisy of a society that’s hopelessly prurient but also compulsively moralizing, a contradiction that could drive any aspiring star off the rails.

Its own star, Mia Goth, has been a constant, too, even as she achieves the slasher ouroboros of being both the villain of the films as well as its final girl. Goth layered on old-age makeup to menace herself in the Texas-set first film, playing the murderous biddy Pearl as well as the aspiring porn performer Maxine, a member of a DIY production that has the misfortune of setting up on Pearl’s property. Goth shed the prosthetics for the second, which delved into Pearl’s WWI-era backstory as a farm wife with chorus-girl dreams and vicious tendencies. This ambitious acting exercise finally becomes something more in this final chapter, in which Goth returns to the role of Maxine, now living in Los Angeles and trying to break into the mainstream after establishing herself as an adult-film star. As the crowning touch on West’s horror-movie mille-feuille, MaXXXine demonstrates that the trilogy never really had all that much going on, depth-wise, despite its sprawl. But Goth does her own synthesis of the characters she’s played across the titles, and the result is alternately disturbing, touching, and downright triumphant.

Her performance is more coherent on an emotional level than MaXXXine is overall, though the film has a smeary, seedy energy, like you’d need to give your hands a serious scrub after touching any of its surfaces. The year is 1985, and L.A. is cowering in the shadow of serial killer Richard Ramirez, known at the time only as the Night Stalker, though when bodies start turning up around Maxine, two detectives, played by Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan, suspect it’s not the work of the notorious culprit but a copycat with ties to her past. Maxine starts to think they may be on to something when a sleazy PI named John Labat (Kevin Bacon) turns up on behalf of a mysterious client, making threatening mentions of what happened in Texas — though why she’d be on the hook for the massacre is never made clear. It doesn’t matter to Maxine, who’s just gotten a role in a religious horror film called The Puritan II and who isn’t about to let anyone get in the way of the gig. When Labat tries to unsettle her by following her in his car, she parks, stalks up to his window, and unhesitatingly punches him in the head with a fistful of keys until he’s left battered and bloody. Not since Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls has a ravenousness for the limelight looked so feral.

Where X riffed on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Pearl was inspired by Sirkian Technicolor, MaXXXine owes a debt to Body Double, which was also set in the blurry borderlands between disreputable B-movies and adult film. As touchpoints go, it’s a pretty good one. Like Brian De Palma’s tawdry-gorgeous thriller, MaXXXine takes place in a city where seediness and luxury coexist, and where a mansion in the Hollywood Hills is just a quick ride away from the peep show where Maxine works when she isn’t shooting porn. The trick isn’t accessing those elite spaces — the women Maxine meets, played by the likes of Halsey and Lily Collins, are always headed off to parties in the hills — but proving you belong there as more than just a party favor for powerful guests. The first time we see Goth in the film, she’s a silhouette strutting through the massive doors of a soundstage: a literal gate, behind which are sitting the metaphorical gatekeepers for whom she’s about to try out.

One of them is Elizabeth Bender (an iceberg-lettuce-crisp Elizabeth Debicki), the director of the first Puritan, whose declarations about wanting to make a sequel that’s a “B movie with A ideas” are clearly meant to be self-referential, as well as self-deprecating. But that’s the irritating thing about West’s project — it’s not a compliment to say that it’s easy to imagine the three films being projected simultaneously on opposing walls of a museum display, because they feel more like an installation to be sampled than stories that need to be experienced one after another. West knows how to move a camera and light a scene, to be sure. When the lens glides from Maxine’s shitty apartment building to follow the departure of her best friend, Leon (Moses Sumney), on a skateboard, and then across the street to the figure staking her out in a car across the street, the sheer artfulness of the shot is its own satisfaction. But MaXXXine, like X and like Pearl, is more focused on being in conversation with the horror genre than it is on its audience. When the film arrives at the conclusion that being a star requires a helping of psychopathy, it’s Goth who’s able to make that feel like something other than a glib punchline.

During that audition scene, she takes what’s become a cliché — the unknown comes in to blow everyone out of the water with their talent — and makes it utterly unnerving by delivering a monologue about being haunted by the devil with wrenching conviction. Then she snaps back to normal, briskly wipes away her tears, and unzips her top with a clinical brusqueness when asked to display her breasts. The business is trauma and tits, and Goth really does make you believe that being strategically broken is the best way to navigate it.