There’s no need to synopsize the plot of
Maxxxine (which includes standard elements like a night-stalking serial killer, a religious cult, an evil daddy, etc.) because it’s a character-driven movie. The actors all know that and appropriately play to it. Despite a male presence in some key roles, this is essentially a women’s movie, and it’s a movie about being a woman in Hollywood. Elizabeth Debicki’s precisely haughty director Liz Bender, who’s at the helm of
The Puritan horror movies within the fictional world of
Maxxxine, is a stand-in for someone like Kathryn Bigelow, and she’s also a professional oracle for Maxine Minx, the pornstar whom she’s hired to star in her new sequel. Liz pointedly dispenses lessons to Maxine in dialogue that Ti West has smartly crafted to speak to the realities that actresses and female directors have dealt with in Hollywood for decades now. In Liz’s weary worldview, Hollywood is a beast, with all that description implies. It’s a town that gives zero fucks about artists. Is Maxine an artist? Does she want to be one? For the duration of this film, she’s merely trying to survive, and in order to do so, she must first beat down the beast of her own past, a sinister one that originated in the first movie in West’s trilogy,
X, which we see a multitude of important flashbacks to throughout
Maxxxine.
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