MaXXXine (2024)

Ti West returns with MaXXXine, the third entry in his X trilogy, in which Mia Goth's aspiring starlet claws her way through 1985 Hollywood while a leather-clad killer and the distant shadow of the Night Stalker thin the herd around her. The film is a pastiche of giallo, slasher, and satanic panic, assembled with real craft and a soundtrack curated by someone who owns the records. It is also, by the standards of our current cultural accounting, a modest specimen. There is ambition here, and there is blood, and the two are not always on speaking terms.

The cast is refreshingly varied (Moses Sumney, Giancarlo Esposito, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Monaghan), though the film declines to remark upon it, which is either a virtue or a missed opportunity depending on which ledger we keep. Maxine is a self-made woman navigating a male-dominated industry, and the director of her breakthrough picture is a woman, though the movie frames this as survival and appetite, not a thesis to be defended. Hollywood's machinery gets a drubbing. A televangelist gets a worse one. The outrage, however, is showbiz outrage, the kind in circulation since the studio system, and the bodies are dispatched with enthusiasm and no editorializing whatsoever.

The result is a genre exercise that gestures toward fame, religious fundamentalism, and the corrupting glare of the camera without ever climbing onto a soapbox. It is a pastiche with a pulse. The sermonizing, such as it is, arrives in the mouth of a murderer, which is a tidy way of having it both ways. West has made a film that wants to be watched, not graded. We grade it anyway. That is the job, and the job is sacred, or near enough.