The power of three

Dancing the macabre in Ti West’s MaXXXine trilogy

Shakespeare harnessed dark magic as old as time itself to cast a spell over the overreaching couple at the bitter heart of The Tragedy of Macbeth, led on by three witches wandering the moors. A story in which a woman is blamed for the downfall of man, which is about as biblical as it gets, indebted to the original sin.

Perhaps this eldritch power courses through the veins of English scream queen and MaXXXine star Mia Goth? An outspoken critic of mainstream awards ceremonies that overlook the artistically rich night terrors of the horror genre, despite sterling entries from the likes of The Shining’s Stanley Kubrick and Don’t Look Now director Nicolas Roeg, she first appeared in the spectral video for Future Unlimited’s dreamy hit Haunted Love, as directed by Shia LaBeouf. Much spookiness followed, including Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness shortly thereafter, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria reanimation and Infinity Pool for body horror scion Brandon Cronenberg.

But it’s in unholy union with Ti West that her gift for the ghoulish has flourished, with the low-budget X catapulting both into the big time.

The X factor

Shot in New Zealand during the lockdown era, it was a hamstring-taut tribute to scuzzy 70s slashers in the vein of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Firmly establishing Goth’s final girl chops as a sex worker who will not surrender when it all goes to hell after she and her amateur porn star mates – including Kid Cudi, Jenny Ortega and Brittany Snow – ill-advisedly shoot on a remote Texan farm owned by conservative prudes with a murderous bent and are picked off one by one.

Arguably X’s greatest strength was its lack of shame in leaning in, with West achieving a nailbiter that feels truly of the era it’s saluting, rather than the winkingly ironic pastiches that have held court for so long. Those two weeks in mandated hotel quarantine also allowed him to pen a second outing that would once more appear to strike a bargain with the devil in achieving that rarest of beasts: a horror prequel centred on the ‘monster’ that actually works.

In a cunning transmogrification, West transformed Goth from final girl to proto-villain as Pearl asked us to imagine, Wicked-like, how the crone who had hunted down Maxine and her mates had become so broken and driven by rage. Moving from grainy film to technicolour brilliance, it thrusts us into what appears to be an idyllic Americana somewhere over the rainbow with The Wizard of Oz but is, in fact, crushed under the chimney of a Lynch-like domestic nightmare. One that’s rotten to the core, racked with another global pandemic in which Pearl is suffocating as the daughter of German parents who would rather the dark secrets of their time in the Great War remained buried.

A rare sequel that broadens the thematic concerns of the first film and cuts deeper, it allows Goth to deliver a tragic masterclass in just how thin the veil is between desperate ambition and dastardly deed. How grasping for that poisoned chalice can hopelessly corrupt the soul, much as it did with the Macbeths. A flair for the theatrical courses through the prequel, not only in Pearl’s dance-driven dreams and the snake-like charms of soon-to-be-Superman David Corenswet’s projectionist and sideline pornographer, who tempts her with a peek at real-life stag movie A Free Ride, but also in Goth’s memorable fourth wall break monologue.  

Back to the future

If X lit up Goth’s name, her star ignited in the hell-trodden glitter of Pearl’s crushed ambitions. Fast forwarding through VHS glitches to the 1980s, West crowns his unplanned trilogy by returning Goth’s consciousness to Maxine’s body, but can the malignant cancer of Pearl’s broken spirit be so easily cast off?

We meet her again in a dark mirror image of Pearl’s excruciating audition. An erotic dancer and porn star, MaXXXine now goes with the triple X in her first name and Minx replacing Miller. Working The Landing Strip, a brilliantly named sweating under red neon club directly under the LAX flight path. Hanging out with gay best friend Leon (Moses Sumney) in the video rental store where he works, she’s channelled the horror of what she went through into bloody-minded determination to succeed at all costs.

Strutting Top Gun-like from the shimmering haze of the relentless LA sun into a darkened lot not unlike a jet plane hangar, she commands Elizabeth Debicki’s imported British horror director – also Elizabeth – to sign her up. “Y’all should cast me in this movie… Cuz I’m a star. Ain’t nobody else like me. The whole world’s gonna know my name.”

Elizabeth does not disagree. Nor should she. To borrow a very ’80s turn of phrase, pity the fool who gets in her way, as one knife-wielding creep in an alleyway discovers in the film’s most fabulously OTT gore splatter. Let’s just say he’s never having kids.

Also in the mix are Bobby Cannavale, having a whale of a time as a fellow wannabe actor who gave up and became a wisecracking LAPD detective instead, and Michelle Monaghan as his strait-laced partner. Giancarlo Esposito’s gar-chomping Teddy Night, Esq is the very image of Hollywood underbelly as her agent-cum-gangster, Halsey dazzles as one of Maxine’s fellow dancers and local actor Uli Latukefu leathers up with two thirds of Cerberus in tow. Sophie Thatcher gets to curtain pull on the ace practical effects West works in abundance, playing a makeup artist tasked with moulding Maxine’s head. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon is having the time of his life at the scuzzier end of Raymond Chandler’s canon as a lousy man well out of his depth going up against Maxine, who’s crushing it so hard right now.  

This really is Goth’s show, with West three for three on creating a world that feels like the real deal, winding her up and letting her go. If the finale’s a little saggier paced then rushes a final act reveal that doesn’t quite land, it hardly matters. By the time she’s chewing LA’s most iconic scenery, we’re boiling in toil and trouble brewed up by our dark queen.

Elsewhere

Read my Infinity Pool chat with Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård from last year’s Berlinale, and with director Brandon Cronenberg.

Here’s why I think Don’t Look Now is one of the finest horror films ever shot.

If you want to know if Greek New Wave director Yorgos Lanthimos channels the power of three in Kinds of Kindness, My ABC radio chat is in the last half hour of this podcast.

Here’s my Time Out review of Macbeth (An Undoing) and its witchy goings on.

A guide to getting started booking MIFF tickets over at Flicks.

Over at ScreenHub, here are my reviews of The Twelve season two and ABC docuseries Maggie Beer’s Big Mission.

And here’s my Saturday Paper review of delirious dystopian novel Big Time, by Jordan Prosser.