MaXXXine2024

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Play trailerMaXXXine | Official Trailer HD | A24

The Review

The trilogy West built with Goth is a century of American hunger told in three rooms. Pearl (1918) was the farm girl who wanted the picture palace and picked up an axe when it refused her. X (1979) was the porn troupe shooting in a borrowed barn, slaughtered by old age’s envy of their youth — all but Maxine, the preacher’s daughter, who drove away over her would-be killer and out of the frame of her father’s televised sermons. MaXXXine opens with home-movie footage of that father, the Reverend Ernest Miller, drilling his little girl in the family creed, and then cuts to 1985: Maxine, unbowed, walking into an audition for The Puritan II, a respectable studio horror sequel — her bridge out of adult film and into the marquee. The audition scene is the film in miniature, and it is electric: she gives the director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) exactly what the room did not expect, and then, asked for anything else, shows them the X factor as if it were a union card. She gets the part. Maxine always gets the part. The question the trilogy has been asking since 1918 is what she will do to keep it.

Around her triumph, her world starts dying in order. Her fellow adult performers Amber James and Tabby Martin (Halsey) turn up murdered, branded with Satanic symbols; her friend Leon Green (Moses Sumney), the video-store clerk who feeds her diet of horror classics, is killed in his shop. Two detectives, Williams and Torres (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale), circle her with the reasonable suspicion that the murders orbit her — and a private investigator named John Labat (Kevin Bacon), greasy as a New Orleans summer, starts tailing her with a VHS tape in his pocket: the evidence reel of the adult film shot on that Texas farm, the one thing that can burn her new life down. She is not a final girl anymore. She is a stakeholder.

What Works

Goth, entire. Across three films she has played a young murderess, that murderess grown old, and the girl who outran her — and Maxine in 1985 is the synthesis: Pearl’s hunger with a survivor’s discipline, ambition worn like armour over visibly unhealed damage. West shoots her the way 1985 shot its stars, and she is never better than in the audition, where the whole trilogy’s theme — performance as survival — plays out in one held room. The city. This is the most lovingly recreated 1985 in modern horror: the video store as cathedral, the neon, the Satanic Panic on the news, a walk across the Universal backlot past the Bates Motel house like a pilgrim passing a shrine. Tyler Bates scores the film and keeps the same melancholy heartbeat under the chrome.

The supporting theft. Kevin Bacon builds Labat out of sweat, charm and pure threat — a man who believes blackmail is a form of flattery — and the film is poorer every minute after the crusher. Debicki’s patrician director, Esposito’s silk-gloved agent and Monaghan and Cannavale’s increasingly desperate detectives all class up a picture that knows exactly how trashy its bones are. And the architecture holds: a trilogy that began with a father’s voice on a television ends with the daughter making him say her lines. That is not a plot twist. That is a thesis, landed.

What Doesn’t

The plot leans on too many scenes that exist to tip the cap to horror icons — a lift from Nightmare on Elm Street that feels like trivia first and cinema second. Debicki’s director teases a moral conflict the film never really funds; her vision of the picture within the picture simply abandons the central thread at the climax. And the climax drops the Ramirez thread entirely, letting a real-world menace glide off stage as a smokescreen.

Spoiler Section

Everything past this point gives away the ending — stop here if you have not seen the film.

The reveal, when it comes, is the trilogy closing its own circle: the killer is not the Night Stalker — Ramirez, whose real 1985 rampage plays on every television in the film as weather, was always the smokescreen. The murders are her father’s. Ernest Miller has come to Hollywood with his ministry’s cameras to film an exposé of its sinfulness, killing her circle as production material and branding the bodies with Satan’s marks to borrow the city’s panic; the finale is a filmed exorcism, with Maxine as the unwilling star of her father’s sermon. The shootout costs both detectives their lives; the last confrontation climbs to the Hollywood Sign itself, where Maxine makes her father recite the creed back to her — I will not accept a life I do not deserve — before she takes it, and everything else, from him for good. She is on the set of The Puritan II, telling the interviewer what the picture means. It means she lived. It always only meant that.

The actress Molly Bennett (Lily Collins), the star Maxine is replacing, is found dismembered.

Maxine’s handling of Labat is the film’s coldest pleasure — she, her agent Teddy Knight (Giancarlo Esposito) and his fixer Shephard Turei take the blackmailer to a junkyard and let a car crusher conduct the negotiation.

Is the Night Stalker the killer in MaXXXine?

No — and spoilers are the toll for the full answer. Richard Ramirez is the film’s weather: a real 1985 panic playing on every television, which the actual killer exploits by branding his victims with Satanic symbols. The murders are the work of Maxine’s father, the televangelist Ernest Miller, filming them as material for a ministry exposé of Hollywood’s sins. The film and its trailers both work hard to keep you suspecting the smokescreen.

Trivia & Facts

• The mantra was her father’s first. “I will not accept a life I do not deserve” is not Pearl‘s line, though it is often credited there — Maxine speaks it in X, and X‘s ending reveals where she learned it: the televangelist on the television is her father. MaXXXine bookends the trilogy on it, opening with his home-movie sermon and ending with her taking the words back.
• The preacher, named at last. Simon Prast played the televangelist in X without a name and returns here as the Reverend Ernest Miller — the trilogy’s longest-held secret, hiding in a television set since 2022. In the credits, incidentally, Maxine’s birth name is Miller; “Minx” is the stage name she chose, which tells you everything about the war the three films are fighting.
• Two hemispheres, one farm. X and Pearl were shot back-to-back in New Zealand in 2021 — Pearl in secret, immediately after X wrapped, on the same farm sets — while MaXXXine was made later and separately, across seven weeks in Los Angeles in the spring of 2023, including the Universal backlot: Maxine’s walk to work passes the Bates Motel set from Psycho, a pilgrimage West frames exactly as one.
• The Night Stalker commits none of it. Richard Ramirez’s real 1985 murders are the film’s backdrop and its smokescreen — he is never a character and kills no one in the picture. The Satanic branding on the victims is set dressing by a killer who understood exactly what the city was already afraid of. The trailers were content to let audiences assume otherwise.
• A cameo in the effects shop. Sophie Thatcher appears, unannounced in advance, as an unnamed makeup FX artist — one of the film’s several winks at its own craft. Goth, meanwhile, had graduated to producer: her name is in the producers’ list alongside Jacob Jaffke, Ti West, Kevin Turen and Harrison Kreiss.

The Verdict

MaXXXine is the glossiest and loosest entry in the trilogy — a neon valentine to 1985 Hollywood that works best as a star showcase for Mia Goth. It does not cut as deep as X or Pearl, but as a closing chapter it earns its marquee.

Rating: 3.5 ravens out of 5.

Harper’s Extras

• Her file. Our MaXXXine wiki file keeps the full record of Maxine Minx’s Hollywood campaign, and the Mia Goth page follows the century she has spent becoming this creature.
• The trilogy, complete. Start at the farm in 1979 with X, then go back to where the hunger was born in Pearl (1918), and finish here under the Hollywood Sign. The Ti West page maps the whole strange, patient project.

Where to Watch

In the US, MaXXXine streams with a subscription on Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Prime Video with Ads. Watch it free with ads on The Roku Channel, Tubi, Plex and Fandango at Home Free, or free on Kanopy and Hoopla. Rent it for $4.99 or buy it for $19.99 on Amazon Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home. Checked November 10, 2026.

FAQ

Do I need to see X and Pearl first?

X, absolutely — MaXXXine is its direct sequel, and the blackmail tape, the mantra and the man on the television mean nothing like as much without it. Pearl is the enriching one: it is a prequel about a different woman, but it is secretly the trilogy’s heart, and the final confrontation under the Hollywood Sign lands twice as hard when you have watched hunger curdle once already in 1918. The crypt’s order: X, Pearl, then this.

Why is MaXXXine spelled with three Xs?

Because Maxine wears her past as a crown. The styling extends the trilogy’s letter game — X the film, the X factor she flashes in her audition — and triples it into the rating her old industry ran on: XXX. She is not hiding where she came from. The title is the argument the whole film makes about who gets to be a star.

Will there be a fourth film in the X trilogy?

On the record as it stands: no. Ti West floated a possible fourth idea in interviews around the release, then said plainly in an August 2024 AMA that MaXXXine is the end of the story, and nothing has been greenlit since. If the crypt hears otherwise from a source worth printing, this page will say so — until then, the trilogy is three films and a complete sentence: she would not accept a life she did not deserve, and in the end, she did not have to.