Taken together with writer-director Ti West’s two previous films — X and Pearl, shot back-to-back and both released in 2022 — MaXXXine is the culmination of a blood-drenched pop-culture meditation on the complicated relationship between ambition and morality. Yes, Maxine wants to be famous but she also wants to be loved and even admired. What is she willing to sacrifice to get what she wants most?
X (released March 2022) and the prequel Pearl (released September 2022) were shot in New Zealand during the COVID pandemic. The trilogy begins, chronologically, during the global Spanish flu outbreak of 1918. On a nowhere-Texas farm, Pearl (Mia Goth), a young woman whose husband is off fighting World War I, is doubly isolated due both to her family’s reasonable fear of the disease and their repressive piety, whose gist is “fun = sin.”
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