Triple Threat: In His Subgenre-Spanning X Trilogy, Ti West Made Mia Goth a Superstar

By Kenneth Lowe  |  December 26, 2024 | 11:02am
Movies Features Ti West
Triple Threat: In His Subgenre-Spanning X Trilogy, Ti West Made Mia Goth a Superstar
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A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe that’s why the trilogy is such a satisfying structure for so many epic series or curious corners of cinema history. This year in Triple Threat, Ken Lowe revisits another of cinema’s best trilogies each month, including some unofficial trilogies that have come to define a director, actor, or time in film history. You can follow the series here.

Horror movies tend to be either standalone entries or franchises that are deathless in every sense of the word: Perennially renewed, their big bads not subject to the petty limitations of mortality. Trilogies in the genre, whether official or unofficial, are therefore pretty special (one of the reasons this makes arguably the fifth one I’ve covered this year, depending on if you count the unofficial ones). Very few horror movie series—very few trilogies at all, when you get down to it—are meticulously planned from the beginning to be trilogies. Hollywood might work that way for big, established franchises that are going to sell a bunch of Happy Meals, but most of the time, any sequels are contingent on the success of the original. That is normally how this stuff is supposed to work.

Being as writer-director Ti West was planning his film X during the initial isolation of COVID-19, stuff was not normal. Isolated, eager to film, and gifted with being in a country with rock-bottom COVID infections at the time (New Zealand) and plenty of available crew, he decided to do something bold, shooting a sequel to X in secret as soon as filming on the first film wrapped. As West said in an interview in 2022, “You can’t make a slasher movie without a bunch of sequels.” In this case, studio A24 fortunately thought it was a good idea.

Mia Goth (who co-wrote the prequel/sequel Pearl with West and plays dual roles in X) was already working her way up to a notable career, starring in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Vol. II and in the creepiest of the three short films that comprise Netflix’s The House. In Ti West’s trilogy, though, any doubts about her ability to carry a film on her own have been laid to rest (in a gator-infested swamp).

The Movies

It’s 1979 and Maxine (Goth) and a vanload of other low-budget filmmakers have a simple plan: Renting a remote guest house on a rural farmstead that they’ll use to shoot a pastoral, pornographic movie. Maxine wants one thing and one thing only, which is to be a star at any cost, even if it’s in the porn industry rather than Hollywood proper. For that, she’s yoked herself to streetwise and sleazy producer Wayne (Martin Henderson) and his cast and crew, who are all a different flavor of idealistic or cynical: On-camera stars Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson (Kid Cudi himself), aspiring auteur cinematographer RJ (Owen Campbell), and his deeply conflicted boom mic operator girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega). When the crew arrives at the secluded farmstead, they discover a hostile, borderline senile owner, Howard (Stephen Ure), and his aged wife Pearl (Goth again, nearly unrecognizable in a total makeup and prosthetic transformation).

Ti West has acknowledged the homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in his film, and it’s obvious in everything from the lead-up to the murder to its nubile-young-kids-vs.-creepy-backwoods-folk premise. What’s interesting, as the film slowly builds up to the bloodbath you just know is coming, is how West puts the tensions of the time period on display—Kid Cudi’s proud porn star is also a Vietnam vet and keen to remind Howard of this. The group of porn stars sit around the cabin and talk sexual liberation with Ortega’s reluctant Lorraine—and when she impulsively decides to bare all, it’s seemingly to make a point to her boyfriend.

Slasher films have always, always had an undercurrent of resentment toward the young and sexually active teens who are so frequently the victims. Films like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon and The Cabin the Woods are a subgenre of metacommentary on this most crypto-conservative of horror genres. West’s approach strips all subtext away, and thank God: Pearl and Howard are killing these kids because they are old, horny, and struggling with their own age and inevitable sexual decline, and they hate to see other people happy. It’s not just stunt casting to put Goth in the dual role of the Final Girl and the arthritic slasher, because, as we see before the final curtain, both characters are defined by their covetousness, the survivor destined to inevitably become the monster.

It was also shorter than two hours! The script was great! They should make more of these.

I feel like we need to remind ourselves of this: Prequels almost universally and uniformly suck. They’re usually unnecessary; they often cheapen or mishandle the characters we already know, or make literal things that are best left figurative or to our imaginations. There’s a reason Kurt Vonnegut advised writers to start a story as close to the conclusion as possible, and prequels remind us of this.

Pearl is a sterling exception, though, the rare backstory that actually enhances the story of the preceding film without doing anything to undo the original’s charm. Set a lifetime before the events of X amid the horrendous Spanish Flu epidemic and the end of World War I, the movie follows Pearl as a young woman who wants the same things Maxine wants in 1979 in X: Fame, fortune, adoration, and an escape from her mundane life. In this case, that life is even more oppressive: Pearl is the daughter of a father living in a vegetative state (Matthew Sunderland) and her overbearing mother (Tandi Wright). Pearl is living locked up at the farmhouse during a global pandemic, isolated and stifled. She can’t trust the oily projectionist she sees on the sly at the movie theater in town (David Corenswet). She can’t meaningfully relate to her beautiful and well-meaning sister-in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro). Her husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) is off at war, and his imminent return is a ticking clock for her.

Pearl’s dreams of connection, of winning an audition to join a big show and be discovered, of getting a ticket out of the cornfields, are repeatedly dashed, all while Ti West paints his Gilded Age milieu in bright primary colors that clash perfectly with Pearl’s descent into madness. Goth has to hold the camera here for unnervingly long stretches of time in a handful of scenes—including a towering monologue where she bares every last emotion that’s been building the whole movie. That Goth pulls it off and that it feels of a piece with two other films that are set in vastly different time periods and consciously directed to have wildly different tones is some kind of acting miracle. It’s a great standalone psychological horror film that somehow also works perfectly within an interconnected trilogy.

It’s inevitable that a third installment in a planned trilogy feels as if it can’t quite stand alone from the previous two entries. After the first two stellar entries (both of which absolutely can stand alone), MaXXXine is notably less independent. Set in 1985 and returning to the heroine from the first film, MaXXXine relies heavily on the events from X for context, though it’s also totally forgivable when it’s this good.

Maxine has by now moved to Hollywood and, years after surviving the bloodbath at the farm, gotten her big break. She’s been cast in her first role outside of porn, in a remake of an old horror film directed by an overbearing auteur director (Elizabeth Debicki). Just as she’s trying to keep her shit together to please this new taskmaster, she’s approached by a grinning P.I. (Kevin Bacon) who is blackmailing her on behalf of some shadowy patron who knows about her blood-soaked past. All the while, other struggling women she knows keep turning up missing, victims of a serial killer police have dubbed the Night Stalker.

Ti West said one of his inspirations for MaXXXine was Dario Argento’s contributions to the giallo subgenre of Italian gorefest slashers, and if you’ve watched some of that director’s work, West has some of the right idea. It’ll sound like an insult to Argento but I promise it isn’t: West’s narrative throughline is, well, too consistent. Not nearly enough stuff is trying to kill Maxine. There’s way too much of a focus on the other message West has been hammering home this whole trilogy: That Maxine’s desire for fame at the cost of all else, especially the other women around her who are also struggling in the pitiless cesspit of L.A., makes her just as much a monster as the Night Stalker, and that the sanctimonious moralizing of the people who are always protesting Hollywood comes from pretty much the same motivation for attention and validation. It’s giallo in form, but not in function. Despite that, the reveal of who the killer is, the knowledge we’ve gained about where Maxine comes from and the parallels it reveals, are all too satisfying to call it a failure.

Also, Giancarlo Esposito flattens Kevin Bacon in a car compactor. Think about the sheer money and egos that had to be managed in order to make that happen.

Best Entry

X and MaXXXine are both fun, smart horror entries that make great use of Mia Goth, who is excellent. But Pearl wins because of how much more focused it is on her performance, specifically, which is the high point of all of these movies. It’s a tidy entry in the trilogy at the same time it’s a weird departure from the other two entries. I was going back and forth on other ways to end this year of Triple Threat, but sitting with Pearl made the case for itself.

Trilogy Trivia

We have COVID to thank for most of what is still bad and unbearable about 2024 and the godawful years yet to come, but I must grudgingly acknowledge that we also have it to thank for these films. Goth and Ti West reportedly hashed out the script for Pearl (and thus the idea that they might expand their little horror film to a series) over a couple of weeks of video calls, and by the time X was ready to film, they had convinced A24 to back them on Pearl, too.

Marathon Potential

None of these movies is quite two hours long and they are all easy, sleazy watches for the gorehounds in your life. Watching them in release order over an afternoon and evening with food and drink seems destined to be a fun way for a lot of folks looking to catch up on some movies they missed come Halloween night 2025.

Next month, join us for a new feature, as we revisit cinema’s most brutal, inventive, and revolutionary fight scenes in Fight Night. For January, it’s the legendary throwdown between two martial arts demigods, Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris, in Way of the Dragon.

Kenneth Lowe would stand in line for this. You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.

 
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