The third film in Ti West’s X trilogy, MaXXXine confirms what we already suspected after X and Pearl: that Mia Goth is a one-off – a gifted genre actor with an unnervingly intense screen presence who is at ease with shape-shifting character work. And while MaXXXine is the weakest of the three films, Goth is well worth the price of admission, if only for the chilling, almost reptilian glaze of ambition in her eyes as she pursues her career dream.
The film unfolds in the fluorescent mid-80s, six years after the messy events of X, and follows porn actor Maxine Minx (Goth) as she makes her jump into mainstream cinema, in a horror movie directed by the demanding Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki). Maxine will let nothing stand in her way, be it a shady private detective (Kevin Bacon, gloriously seedy and unsavoury) or the serial killer who stalks the Hollywood Hills.
Gore addicts will be sated – the prosthetics and makeup are robustly grisly – but the story feels rather too glib and predictable to be fully satisfying.
• In UK and Irish cinemas
