‘MaXXXine’ Review: Ti West And Mia Goth’s Horror Trilogy Comes To A Satisfyingly Bloody Conclusion

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Ti West’s decades-spanning horror trilogy, which began in the late ’70s with X (2022) and then jumped back over half a century for the same year’s WW1 prequel Pearl, now fast-forwards to the mid-’80s with a capper that requires a little more thought than its gory, crowd-pleasing predecessors.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the Reagan years would be West’s safe space, given 2009’s pitch-perfect period piece The House of The Devil (which covers similar ground, thematically), but MaXXXine pulls back on that kind of detail in a way that’s surprising.

Despite the obvious genre set-up, which promises way more violence than you’d expect, but is pretty gory when you do get it — West’s film is actually an abstract think-piece about women in cinema, predicated on Bette Davis’s quote: “In this business, until you’re known as a monster, you’re not a star.” It begins in 1959 with a black-and-white home movie of a young girl dancing. “That’s my little girl,” says a fatherly voice offscreen.

She’s certainly ambitious. “I’ll do whatever it takes,” she tells him cheerfully and emphatically. “I will not accept a life I do not deserve!” The girl is the young MaXXXine Minx (Mia Goth), and, though the film doesn’t expressly spell it out for a while, prior to the shocking events of X — “The Texas Porn-Shoot Massacre,” as the tabloid headlines later put it — it seems MaXXXine is already scarred from a straitlaced upbringing with an overbearing, ultra-religious father (the sinister Simon Prast).