The 2020s, thus far, has been the best decade for horror in decades, with the dominant trends of the 2000s and 2010s (the remake cycle; found footage; the Saw, Insidious and Conjuring franchises) mostly dead or winding down. And in the midst of this scene an exciting, wholly new trilogy appeared out of nowhere, Ti West’s X/Pearl/MaXXXine. There’s no one simple premise animating the trilogy as a whole, and each film is a very distinct entity, but the general outline is: X follows a group of aspirational porn filmmakers in the 1970s who find themselves in a massacre in Texas; Pearl takes us back to 1918 for the backstory of the old lady from X; MaXXXine is a sort-of direct sequel to X, following its heroine’s attempts to make it in Hollywood.
The selling point for the series, instead, is twofold: one, Mia Goth gives compelling, and very different, performances as the lead in each film; and two, each film homages different eras and styles of Hollywood filmmaking: 70s exploitation and porn for X; the Golden Age of Hollywood and Technicolor musicals for Pearl; while MaXXXine has the most diverse array of influences, covering Brian De Palma, giallo, 80s slashers and the long-running tradition of Hollywood films about Hollywood.
X is, sadly, currently absent from Second Sight’s catalogue (curiously, as their Ti West collection includes The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, The Sacrament, and of course the latter two parts of the X trilogy), but it is a solid 70s throwback that weaves in interesting themes of sexuality, desire, age and mortality. It is also by some distance the least ambitious of the three.
Pearl and MaXXXine are linked particularly by their thematic focus on different eras of Hollywood filmmaking, as well as their absolutely standout cinematography – this latter one being perhaps the reason that X isn’t available in the 4K UHD format given to these two.
Pearl rewinds all the way back to Pearl‘s young adulthood in 1918, living at the same farm that she will inhabit in her old age, married but with their husband away fighting the First World War, and thanks to the Spanish Flu epidemic, effectively trapped with her paralysed father and harsh, at times cruel, mother. Feeling loveless, Pearl’s escape is – as for so many – the movies, still in their infancy yet already self-mythologising. Unsurprisingly, given the character we know Pearl will grow into, she shows increasingly disturbing acts of cruelty, beginning with slaughtering a goose with a pitchfork. And so all the elements are set for a tragic character study, yet the film unfolds with patience and humanity over its 100 minutes.
But the stroke of genius of Pearl is the choice to shoot it in the style of a Technicolor spectacular of Hollywood’s Golden Age. This is of course anachronistic, for in 1918 the movies were still silent and black-and-white. Indeed, we learn in the extras here that the original plan was to shoot in black-and-white, but the existence of The Lighthouse and others sent Ti West, Mia Goth and their team back to the drawing board. Yet its hard to imagine as perfect a choice to encapsulate, not the movies Pearl actually sees, but the eye-popping, realer-than-real world they offer her; silent film no longer affects audiences in this way, but the likes of The Wizard of Oz, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Mary Poppins continue to.
It would be easy for all this to spill over into camp – there’s even a WWI dance number – but while the film has jokes, it never becomes a joke. Key to all this, of course, is Mia Goth in the best of the four performances she gives over the course of the trilogy. It’s rare for an actor to be so well-served by their script, and for an actor in turn to elevate a film to such a degree. Pearl – whether audiences have seen X beforehand or not doesn’t really matter – is destined to be looked back on as one of the great films of a great decade for genre cinema.
While X and Pearl may not have been excessively huge box-office successes, critical response – particularly to Pearl – was so overwhelmingly positive that a concluding chapter to the trilogy seemed inevitable. Just two years later arrived MaXXXine, in which Mia Goth reprises the character of Maxine, who has survived the events of X and gone to Hollywood to seek the stardom that she – and her counterpart Pearl – always longed for. Soon enough she’s caught up in a new series of killings, not a random killing spree this time but a conspiracy clearly targeting her. And so, both aided and menaced by a series of Hollywood-type grotesques, she sets out to solve the mystery, remain alive, keep the job she’s landed in mainstream horror The Puritan II, and ultimately to become “a fuckin’ star!”
MaXXXine had a lot working against it from the start: the weight of expectation, for a start; the risk of the ideas well running dry; the need to deliver a conclusion to a series that sprang up on the spot with no conclusion intended; the usual sense of disappointment that comes with third entries in trilogies; and the need for Mia Goth to deliver another performance on par with the astonishing Pearl and her impressive dual rôle in X. As it happens the film doesn’t really manage to overcome any of these, and introduces new problems of its own. It’s driven far more by its plot than its characters, and that plot manages to be simultaneously too convoluted, too meandering, and too predictable. In turn this gives the film’s actors, particularly Goth, few opportunities to shine. Around her is assembled a much larger cast than the limited X and Pearl, with major names like Kevin Bacon, Giancarlo Esposito, and Elizabeth Debicki playing characters too cartoonish (the nasty private eye, the sleazy agent with a heart of gold) or too thinly-drawn (the no-nonsense film director) for us to feel any particular way about them. Even Maxine herself, in all this, isn’t much of a player, reduced to simply running from murder to death threat to interrogation to murder to interrogation and so on. It’s almost exactly the same length as Pearl, but it goes from feeling too rushed to much too drawn-out.
What MaXXXine does have going for it – and it’s still a worthwhile film, by all means – is an incredibly loving attention to aesthetics. It’s a visually breathtaking film, and in almost the exact opposite way to the sunshine of Pearl. It’s all grit and smoke and sinister red and blue lighting. A lot of films, particularly 80s period pieces, invoke that neon aesthetic, yet things almost always end up looking too clean, too modern, too artificial. It’s easy to imagine MaXXXine in the video racks alongside the very films it evokes: early Michael Mann, De Palma thrillers like Body Double and Dressed to Kill, The Terminator. It’s also a film absolutely packed with Easter eggs for the true film nerd, yet it respects its audience’s intelligence and never allows those moments and details to overwhelm the point at hand. While its narrative and, indeed, its warmed-over themes (Hollywood has a dark side – who knew?) may not reward repeated watches, it puts so much care into making its setting breathe detail that it’s a pleasure just to spend 100-odd minutes inside the film’s seedy world.
Pearl rating (the film): ★★★★★
MaXXXine rating (the film): ★★★☆☆
The first of Pearl‘s special features is a commentary by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who finds that the film, with its combination of horror and Sirkian melodrama is the perfect vehicle for talking about a number of her bugbears in the field of film criticism, given her background in criticism of both genres. The commentary is knowledgeable but, for me, often just too pissed-off to make for an enjoyable listen; you may want to weigh up your tolerance for such a tone before listening. As usual, in-depth interviews are included also. These include “Bold Choices” with Ti West; “The Mother” with Tandi Wright, who acted both as the film’s intimacy co-ordinator and played Ruth, Pearl’s mother; “Absorb the Aesthetic” with director of photography Eliot Rockett; “Going Technicolor” with production designer Tom Hammock, who, much as Rockett does, talks a fair bit about the differences between making X and Pearl.
Those asides, there is the video essay “Hollywood Goes West”, which covers much of the same ground as the commentary, but does so faster and with a killer closing montage. Two final, short pieces ported over from Pearl‘s previous release are “Coming Out of Her Shell” and “Time After Time”. Both are short behind-the-scenes pieces, with the former giving a general overview of Pearl‘s genesis and production, the latter focussing specifically on Pearl‘s nature as a period piece.
For MaXXXine there was always going to be a risk of the special features becoming redundant. This poses no problem for the commentary by Bill Ackerman and Amanda Reyes, which is jam-packed with details about the locations visited and references deployed in the film, with literally hundreds of prior Hollywood productions being name-dropped. While MaXXXine is certainly the lesser film of the pair and of the trilogy, the commentary is highly recommended and may bring viewers (listeners?) to a new appreciation.
The interviews provided here are shorter than is standard for Second Sight, perhaps due to the potential for repetition mentioned above. “Back to the Page” catches up with Ti West, who stops just short of acknowledging that MaXXXine was made more for fun and a sense of completeness than out of artistic necessity. “Money On the Screen” sees producer Jacob Jaffke discussing the genesis of the whole trilogy and its impact on his own career, while “B-Movie Aesthetic” is another interview with director of photography Elliot Rockett – more technical than the last, fittingly for MaXXXine‘s greater variety of locations and aesthetics. “Curating Space” is the last and best of the four interviews, with production designer Jason Kisvarday going over the production design challenges of recreating 1980s Hollywood – ironically, one of the biggest challenges was making Universal’s soundstages actually look like soundstages.
The other extras include a video essay, “The Whole World’s Gonna Know My Name” by Kat Hughes, on the thematic place of stardom – or longing for stardom – within the film. These video essays are always short, usually to their credit, but a little too much time is spent here simply recapping the plot for such a short piece. Finally, the extras from MaXXXine‘s previous release (only a year ago!) are ported over: the behind-the-scenes “Belly of the Beast” and “XXX Marks the Spot”, and “Hollywood is a Killer” (focussing specifically on special make-up effects), and a twenty-five minute Ti West Q&A on stage with Jen Yamato.
While these extras meet Second Sight’s general high standard, they don’t exceed it – in this way Second Sight is a victim of its own success, for these are still fairly extensive extras packages. The final thing to note is that, MaXXXine‘s quality as a narrative aside, these are both among the best-looking movies of the decade, making both films near-essential purchases for anyone looking to get the most out their 4K system – indeed, Second Sight have gone as far as not to even offer the Blu-Ray option.
Pearl rating (the overall release): ★★★★★
MaXXXine rating (the overall release): ★★★★☆