There is a moment early in MaXXXine when Maxine Minx crushes a man’s testicles in an alleyway with the confidence of someone stepping on a grape at a winery. If you enjoy that moment, congratulations — it’s the last time the movie feels remotely alive. Everything that follows is a slow, neon-drenched collapse, like watching a VHS tape melting in a microwave but for two straight hours.
Ti West’s X trilogy began with a clever homage to 70s sleaze (X) and followed with a strangely effective Technicolor prequel (Pearl). MaXXXine should have been the brutal, glitter-coated exclamation point. Instead, it’s a shrug wearing leg warmers.
Plot? More Like a Hollywood Sidewalk: Cracked, Sticky, and Full of Bad Decisions
Maxine Minx, aspiring scream queen and struggling adult film star, wants to make it big in Hollywood. She auditions for The Puritan II, because of course Hollywood in this universe is greenlighting sequels to a movie nobody liked. She gets the role — not because she’s talented, but because the casting director wanted someone “gritty,” which here translates to “has killed before and is available.”
Meanwhile the Night Stalker killings are happening in Los Angeles, but don’t worry: the movie won’t do anything interesting with that. It’s simply background noise — like sirens, smog, and Kevin Bacon’s questionable mustache.
As Maxine chases fame, she’s stalked by a leather-clad killer who leaves VHS tapes as calling cards. Think Scream but with worse fashion and none of the wit. Bodies pile up. Satanic symbols appear. People Maxine knows start dying. Maxine barely reacts because she’s focused on making The Big Movie. It’s the most realistic part of the film.
The Slashing Is Sharp, but the Plot Is a Butter Knife
The murders in MaXXXine are stylish. The gore is glossy. The lighting looks like someone let Mario Bava loose inside a tanning salon. But none of it adds up to tension. This is a slasher with:
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No mystery
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No suspense
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No stakes
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No one making decisions that resemble human behavior
The killer is revealed to be Maxine’s televangelist father, Ernest Miller — because nothing says “creative writing” like Daddy Issues: The Trilogy. He and his cult want to make a snuff film exposing Hollywood’s sins. Honestly, in 1985? They could’ve saved time and just released Howard the Duck.
There’s also a private investigator (Kevin Bacon) who stalks Maxine so aggressively that the movie briefly feels like a tax-evading remake of Cape Fear. His purpose? To chew scenery until the script kills him in the most Ti West way possible: needlessly drawn-out and weirdly slapstick.
Maxine Herself: An Icon in Theory, a Cartoon in Practice
Mia Goth is one of the best horror actors alive — a twitching, screaming, unhinged powerhouse. But here, Maxine is less a character and more a parody of what people think a cult horror character should be. She has the emotional depth of a makeup tutorial.
Her reactions to horror include:
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staring vacantly
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swearing
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putting on more lipstick
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murdering people with Home Depot-adjacent enthusiasm
Her ultimate confrontation with her father at the Hollywood sign aims for mythic catharsis, but the movie is so tonally confused that it plays like an SNL sketch about slasher endings. At one point, a police helicopter interrupts the showdown, which is the cinematic equivalent of your mom knocking on your bedroom door during your goth phase.
The Supporting Cast: A24’s Hunger Games
Elizabeth Debicki shows up as the arthouse director of The Puritan II, which I assume is a joke about how tall, elegant women keep ending up in mediocre horror sequels.
Halsey makes an appearance, her entire performance consisting of “being in danger while wearing good makeup.”
Lily Collins plays a doomed actress whose character arc is “shows up, dies, gets stuffed in a suitcase,” which frankly is more than Lily Collins gets in half her indie films.
Giancarlo Esposito plays Maxine’s agent who believes in her, supports her career, and then… disappears from the movie because the script got bored.
And Kevin Bacon turns up looking like a man who lost a bet in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. He’s fun, but he’s also performing like he’s in a better movie somewhere off-camera.
The Aesthetic: Delicious Trash Wrapped Around a Rotten Core
Let’s be clear:
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The 80s aesthetic? Incredible.
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The music? Perfectly synthetic.
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The set design? Immaculate.
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The tone? More confused than a televangelist at a drag brunch.
The movie looks phenomenal. It’s sexy, sweaty, neon, filth-glam. But the style is so overpowering it overshadows the actual story — which is, unfortunately, a Pinterest board of ideas taped together with cocaine and hope.
It’s like eating the world’s most beautiful cake only to find out it’s made of drywall and regret.
The Final Fight: A Hallucination, a Helicopter, and a Headshot Walk Into a Bar
The ending tries to be operatic: Maxine, the Hollywood sign, the shotgun, the burning cult, the fantasy sequence where she imagines stardom. It should be epic. Instead, it’s chaotic in the “did the editor fall asleep?” way.
The showdown is so abrupt and undercooked that when Maxine blows her father’s face off, the audience reaction is not “YES!” but “Okay? I guess?”
The movie forgets to do the emotional groundwork that would make the moment satisfying. It’s like watching someone slap a stranger in a grocery store — surprising but not meaningful.
Verdict: A Triple-X That Should’ve Been Rated ZZZ
⭐ 3/10
(One point for the neon. One point for Mia Goth’s commitment. One point for Kevin Bacon’s hair making me laugh harder than any intended joke.)
MaXXXine is not the worst slasher ever made — that honor belongs to any movie that has ever used the phrase “you’re next” unironically. But it is the worst version of the movie it tries to be. It’s cramped with ideas yet hollow at the center. It’s visually luscious but narratively starving. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a bedazzled toaster: shiny, loud, and utterly useless for making anything you’d want to consume.
The X trilogy deserved a killer climax.
Instead, it got a flaccid shrug in a silver bodysuit.
