For those who may not be familiar, director Ti West and actress Mia Goth collaborated on a trilogy of connected films released between 2022 and 2024. First released was X, a horror film set in 1979 in which Goth played two separate roles: a young porn actress named Maxine Minx and a very elderly woman named Pearl.
Showings of the film ended with a trailer for a second prequel entitled Pearl and based on a collaborative script between West and Goth about her elderly character’s backstory. They shot X and Pearl back-to-back, coinciding with the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, allowing for a quick release of the prequel.
Two years later West released the third film, MaXXXine, a sequel to X. At the time of that release, West spoke of an idea to expand the series with a further movie, but soon after he decided that the third movie would really be the best place to stop.
While the first two films were extremely well received by audiences and critics alike, the third one seems to have gotten a far more muted response. Partially this may come from the fact that the three movies are very different in style and tone despite having so many elements in common. As I’ve seen more of West’s work, I’m struck by how he avoids simply making a similar movie over and over. I can understand people being fans of some – but not all – of the X trilogy because of unfulfilled expectations based on the first. But even those who recognize and appreciate the different nature of each movie seem to find MaXXXine to be the least of them all. Why is that?
I’ve now gone back and re-watched the entire trilogy across two days to put some of my thoughts on the X series down, including possible answers to that question, and an argument for why that third film should be better appreciated within the context of the series as a whole.
X (2022)
X has to be my favorite movie of the trilogy. It was my introduction to Ti West, and a movie I went to see in the theater knowing next to nothing about it other than it was horror and I expected a good time whether the movie itself were good or bad. I think I even went in with this vague sense that these A24 movies that I’d happen to see now and then seemed to all be really good. So, it’s hard to top the joy of ‘discovering’ X and its director, being blown away by how great the movie was.
Even pushing it higher in my esteem, X is slasher, and clearly inspired by ’70s exploitation grindhouse cinema and classics such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But it wasn’t just a rehash or crude imitation of these. It was art, as creatively interesting as the original ‘sleaze’ West clearly admires.
The plot is simple. A young group of people come to property in Texas where they’ve rented a guest house to shoot a porn movie: The Farmer’s Daughters. They don’t tell the elderly couple (Howard & Pearl) who owns the property why they are there, or what they are shooting. But Pearl finds out. It further awakens her latent passions, and soon she is killing the young deviants in her sexual frustrations and jealousy; Howard joins in to protect his wife.
Beneath this layer of sex and horror gore are the central thematic threads that make up the entire trilogy: sexual repression, sexual freedom, feminism and masculinity, the desire for escape to a better life, and the dream of becoming a celebrity, a star. With these themes X compares and contrasts Maxine and Pearl (to repeat, both played by Goth) and sets up the prequel movie to establish how Pearl has become what she is.
Pearl (2022)
Pearl has to be my favorite movie of the trilogy. It’s a film that completely works on its own as a heart-wrenching tragedy. As a prequel it greatly enriches X, but X is not necessary to see for Pearl; it doesn’t really add or take away from it. The movie understandably received a lot of awards buzz for Mia Goth, and Martin Scorsese notably raved about it. More than X or MaXXXine, Pearl is a showcase of talented film-making with a consistency from its opening majestic shot to the final prolonged shot of Pearl’s forced-smiling face. X takes awhile to get going with its plot and to build its themes with the porn film shoot before getting to the horror. Pearl is fraught with emotion and tension from the get-go.
Pearl is more of a psychological horror with moments of physical violence/gore, compared to the slasher/exploitation vibes of X. The movie opens with parallels to the opening shot of X to reveal the Texas farmland and house, but now in its full vibrancy of 1918. The dilapidated darkness of 1970s horror are replaced with glowing technicolors inspired by The Wizard of Oz. Here West pairs the bright optimistic look of a Disney film with the darkness of human nature underneath.
With swelling orchestration, we see the young Pearl blissfully dancing, dreaming of a life beyond the farm, a destiny to be a star on the stage and the growing realm of motion pictures. But Pearl’s dreams are limited by responsibilities to her religiously strict, oppressive mother and her polio-disabled father. As her new husband Howard is off in France fighting in World War I, Pearl is left behind with festering resentment at her predicament in life, but a fear or inability to escape it. The conflicts within her are exacerbated by bursts of violent tendencies towards animals and unfulfilled sexual drives. Not surprisingly (and given what we know from X) it is not long before the violence extends to fellow humans.
Rewatching X after seeing Pearl makes the first movie even better. But if you’re only going to watch one movie from the trilogy, I believe Pearl should be the one.
MaXXXine (2024)
MaXXXine has to be my favorite movie of the trilogy. It’s an essential and fulfilling close to the thematic and character arc comparison and contrast between Peal and Maxine. While Pearl works solely on its own, the mirror that West and Goth hold up to Pearl through the character of Maxine in X only finds the clarity of resolution with the third movie. Just as Pearl enriches X, so too does MaXXXine enrich that first movie with thematic and character closure.
Maxine survives the end of X, but we don’t see her character progress to the point of personal success and fame that she desires (as Pearl once did as well). Given Maxine’s resilience and survival as ‘final girl’ we might assume she might attain what Pearl was never able to. But it’s not certain.
MaXXXine begins in 1985, approximately six years after the events of X. Maxine is now living in LA, trying to crossover from porn into mainstream film by trying out for a part in a popular horror franchise sequel. With an audition scene that could be compared to Pearl’s audition scene in the prequel, we see Maxine nail the tryout (and soon get the role) through the willingness to do whatever is necessary and confidently demonstrate that “X Factor” she knows she has. The confidence that Goth conveys here in her words and movement are a stunning contrast to how she played young Pearl.
With this third movie West takes us down another corner of horror, more akin to the Italian giallo form that combines elements of horror with murder mystery into a sort of campy ’80s thriller. I don’t think this type of movie has the kind of immediate recognition as one like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that has been imitated and ‘rebooted’ countless times. For fans of the X films, this turn might seemingly come out of left field, baffling.
Within the context of the series and each movie having very different inspiration and vibes in its DNA, this totally works, particularly with the era of its setting and the psychological state of Maxine at this point. Years have passed since the massacre, but she is not over the trauma of the killing by Howard & Pearl, or the killing she did to survive. The woman at the start of X who couldn’t look (and retched) at the gore of bovine roadkill is now a woman who will stomp on an attacker’s testicles without batting an eye.
MaXXXine has all sorts of other elements (and characters) that come from that giallo family of inspiration, but I don’t need to get into all of that here. Beyond the change in style/genre for the third film, the other aspect of it that might cause less audience love is its ending, which is simultaneously open-ended in some regards while firmly closing out the themes that X first brought up and Pearl expanded.
The ending of MaXXXine shows Maxine achieving everything that Pearl yearned for, everything that Pearl was unable to attain and thus reacted with bitterness and violence. Yet, with its opening quote by Bette Davis, MaXXXine shows how perhaps monstrous, and perhaps empty, Maxine’s success and celebrity are. Yet, the ending also shows just how much Maxine is able to succeed on her own terms and decide her own life, rather than being held in check/back by societal and familial expectations.
The X Trilogy
The X Trilogy has to be my favorite above any single one of its films. These are just a great set. Each unique with certain elements going for them as homages to different horror subgenres. Each artistic in their individual own right, yet forming a collective whole that complete the themes of the set. X introduces Pearl and Maxine, but only Pearl and then MaXXXine really complete their individual stories, and the different outcomes of that X Factor that the two women manifest. Pearl and Maxine: Two similar women with similar forces in their young lives, but living in two very different times, with different possibilities, different outlets/internalization of their emotions, and different abilities to break free.
