Maxxxine

 It begins, of course, with barn doors opening. Only this time they don't belong to a barn, but to a giant studio soundstage. In struts Maxine Minx, porn starlet, determined to cross over and become the biggest goddamn star in Hollywood. And the film... it just struts right along with her and doesn't ease up until the credits are well past done.

 She's there to audition for the sequel to a controversial horror movie. And, in the course of a beautifully filmed one-shot, she proceeds to (as she brashly puts it to the rest of the hopefuls lining outside the casting call) fucking nail it. Her transformation is astounding, calculated to floor us as much as the directors and producers casting her. It's a bravura sequence that's quickly, pointedly deflated by one of the producers asking to see Maxine's breasts; To which she quickly complies, of course. She's a pro.

 Maxxine is the capper to a slasher-adjacent trilogy writer/director Ti West started with X and Pearl - all shot mostly with the same crew and all starring the ridiculously talented Mia Goth. All you need to know from them, really, is that Maxine was the only survivor - the final girl - from the massacre of a whole porn crew on the remote Texas farm they had chosen as a set.

 You should watch them anyways. Not just because they'll let you appreciate shared themes and motifs (the opening barn doors, for example, how Maxine's casting references the monologue in Pearl, or the differing mottoes that inform their characters' worldviews), but because they are both incredible.

 Both prior movies were slasher movies cross-pollinated with clever, extremely dry humour. While X is knowingly a fairly formulaic horror film, Pearl is a much more complicated beast: a character study wearing the skin of a technicolour melodrama with some gruesome killings sprinkled in and a wicked sense of black humour.

 Maxxxine takes its queues, narrative and stylistic, from trashy '80s culture - Satanic panic, Brian DePalma and Angel. And also Giallo - a whole lot of it, from the lurid colours and the way stabbings are shot to the fetishistical focus on the killer's very expressive thick leather gloves, complete with squeaky leather sounds.

 After the events of X, Maxine's moved to LA and worked diligently to move on up in the world. Aware that her porn star career has a sell by date and that she's rapidly approaching it, she's been doggedly pursuing crossover success. Just when it looks like she's made it, a sleazy creep of a private investigator (Kevin Bacon, beautifully milking the role for all it's worth) turns up and tries to coerce her into meeting his employer for some nefarious end.

 The film is set during the couple of years that the Night Stalker was killing women in the area, too, giving the film a nasty sense of background menace - one that's quickly realized once Maxine's friends and coworkers start popping up dead.

 Calling it horror might be a bit of a stretch, but it's a highly entertaining, grisly thriller with a Fangoria gorehound sensibility: Heads will explode, balls will be (graphically) busted, and body parts will tumble down a stairwell with artistic abandon.
 The mystery itself is ridiculous in not entirely satisfying ways. It works well driving the rising suspense, but when all is revealed, while funny, it's a little too over the top and on-the-nose, like an off-hand joke that somehow became a plot point. And the film as a whole is let down by a weak ending that sets up a righteous third act bloodbath and then messes up the action, both conceptually and stylistically.

 It somewhat threatens to overshadow the rest of the film, which is a shame, because other than that relatively minor stumble, it's a stunningly realized creation. It looks incredible - cinematographer Eliot Rockett and colorist Tom Poole faithfully recreate the grimy, grainy look of celluloid on digital, and West's muscular yet detailed directing style mirrors how driven Maxine herself is. The prologue and title sequences alone are worth the price of admission.

 The acting is excellent; Not just from Goth and Bacon, but from a whole ensemble of memorable characters: Elizabeth Debicki as a hardass director, Giancarlo Esposito as an agent who's absolutely not above getting his hands dirty, and Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale liven things up considerably as a pair of homicide detectives.

 Beyond that there's a whole lot of filmic references that, honestly, don't seem to come to much; Is there any point in making a rapist look like Buster Keaton, other than to lump him in with the other celebrity impersonators on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? The same goes for a chase down the Universal backlot that ends in the Bates Motel, which looms big in the film as a whole but never seems to really stand in for anything but Maxine's aspirations (it's pretty funny when the director makes sure to mention Psycho II was shot there a couple years earlier, though).

 Still: Maxxine may hit a few minor bum notes, come off as a little hollow, but it's still a gorgeous-looking film that's a huge amount of fun. It doesn't stand at the same level as the other two movies in the trilogy, but even if it ultimately misses the mark it's still an ambitious, well-crafted movie bursting with memorable scenes and the subversive sense of humour that lines all of these films.

Infinity Pool

 James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are vacationing at a vacation resort in Li Tolqa (filmed in Croatia); James is a failed writer struggling to write a follow-up to his first book, Em comes from money; Their marriage isn't going that great.

 After a startling, low-key violent incident with one of the locals they meet fellow tourists Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert). Gabi comes on strong to James, having read and loved his novel. His ego stoked, James becomes a lot more social (to Em's resentment) and soon both couples are off on an unsanctioned visit to the countryside to sample the local sights.

 It's a mild outing, except for the part when Gabi creeps up on James as he's taking a piss and gives him a handjob- complete with an on-screen (prosthetic) dick and money shot. As you'd expect from any of the Cronenbergs, it's a spectacularly unsexy sex scene and plays almost like body horror. It's a running theme, just like the resort is shot to be pretty much the opposite of paradisiacal. Camberley-esque, is I believe the word for that.
 And then as James is driving the group back, he runs over and kills a local.

 Things develop similarly to The Forgiven: they don't call the police and instead head back to the compound, but are found out anyways. Then the police show up and take them away.
 It's a familiar nightmarish scenario for anyone who's been a tourist: guilt and the intrinsic fear of the foreign, compounded by multiple hints about local resentment and corruption, and the contrast between the resort and the impoverished countryside.

 As it turns out, Li Tolqa has a very creative approach to justice. According to their legal system, manslaughter - even involuntary - is punishable by death, the execution to be carried out by the victim's next-of-kin.
 But because tourism is one of the few ways the country has to make money, there's a way to get out. Li Tolqa happens to have the technology to build fully developed clones of people who share all their memories (shhh, just go along with it). So if a foreigner is willing to part with a lot of money to build one of these clones, he can have this clone be put to death as a surrogate. Oh, and he needs to witness the killing.

 It's a major contrivance, but... well, that's what the movie's about. More importantly, it's a deeply but subtly horrific conceit at an existential level. Not for James, though; he's weirdly entranced by seeing his copy be brutally stabbed to death, while Em is horrified; another wedge between them. When they get back to the resort - effectively getting away with murder, James is inducted to a group of expats who've been indulging in the possibilities that Li Tolqa's cloning technology allow for years. And from there the movie spirals out in all sort of debauched, inventive, and bizarre tangents.

 Infinity Pool is unnerving, grimly hilarious, enthralling and wince-inducing in equal measure. It's a weird, weird movie that's hard to get a handle on, which gives it a queasy power. This is strengthened by writer/director Brandon Cronenberg's careful, clinical direction, Karim Hussain's beautiful, washed-out cinematography, and a cool, pulsing, cacophonic score by Tim Hecker. Even the weird typography for the title card and credits.
 Skarsgård gives his character's bizarre arc a lot of heft - getting over self loathing through self-murdering, only to later have his ego crushed in a way that gave me sympathy for a very closed-off, unsympathetic character; the guy specializes in recklessly brave, vanity-less performances, and this is a memorable one. But he's outshone by Mia Goth often in full-on crazy mode, playing a wonderful role that evolves through the movie, always emerging in a weirder shape than before. Funny, terrifying and terrifyingly sexy in equal measure - between this and Pearl, she should win all the actor awards this year. All of them.

 I think I love it? I'm not sure, I'm still digesting it - there's a lot to unpack in this movie, tons of interesting stuff going on beneath the tourists run amok surface reading. Ask me again later.
 But yeah, I'm pretty sure I love it.

Pearl

 It's a fucking miracle, I tell you. We would be lucky any year that gives us a slasher film as good as X (which came out before I kicked this blog to life again, but here's my review: It's great and go watch it already!) But it turns out that Ti West had gotten the green light for his next film from A24 before that one was in the can, so he shot a prequel back-to-back, reusing the location and Mia Goth.
 Now we're in the enviable position of having two kick-ass Ti West movies released within less than ten months.

 Pearl begins with a parallel opening to X; In X, it was a very clever shot moving towards the entrance of a barn from inside, the darkened threshold dropping away and slowly expanding the aspect ratio to widescreen as the police arrived to a crime scene. In Pearl, the barn door is shut - and when the doors open, instead of the semi-desaturated, sun-drenched carnage of the earlier movie, we get an eye-popping, glorious technicolor view of the farm as it was back in 1918.

 It's set at the tail end of the first world war and during the influenza plague (both of which have a tangible presence throughout the film), yet the tone and style of the movie are closer to the fifties, and yes, more specifically to the films of Douglas Sirk, from the title lettering to the heightened melodrama.
 (I should note I've only seen one of Sirk's movies; I didn't particularly like it, I barely even remember it... but I feel I have a decent handle on him thanks to his influence over others like Haynes and Ozon. Philistine! Boo! Hiss! And all that, I know, I know.)

Ahem.

 Pearl is a melodramatic character study about Pearl (Mia Goth), a small town girl who worries that she will waste her life at a farm in the ass-end of nowhere. She's exuberant, funny, completely relatable, and a hot mess of a sociopath.
 We get our first taste of all this - and a good illustration of how the movie will go down - with her first scene, where she feeds the animals at the barn while charmingly bantering with them, cute as a button. She shows them her dance moves. Then a goose interrupts, so she kills it with a pitchfork and feeds it to Theda, the alligator in the pond out back.

 An origin story, then, for the monster she'll become (in oldface) in the sequel... or maybe by the end of this one. But this is not a slasher movie; The colorful cinematography, period-appropriate music and heightened, slightly histrionic acting are not (just) an aesthetic choice, the movie follows suit and puts the melodrama front and center.
 It's easy to see what would drive Pearl - who isn't very stable to begin with - to murder people before we get a single drop of (non-goose) blood. Her mother (Tandi Wright) loathes and resents her, partly with good reason, though you have to wonder if it's a chicken-and-egg situation; her father (Matthew Sunderland) is an invalid who can barely move his facial muscles (one of the funniest gags in this very bleakly hilarious movie is how much better he gets at emoting as the movie goes on). Pearl's husband is off in the war, fate unknown.
 She's trapped in a life she abhors.

 Pearl dreams of running away, of being a dancer in the movies. But of course we know she's never going to leave the farm, since she'll be there fifty-odd years later killing porn people and a many implied others, feeding their remains to a descendant of the same crocodile that ate that goose. It's a cruel trick - I really wanted that loveable psycho to pull her shit together!
 I wonder how this would have played if I hadn't seen X before, without this air of inevitability.

 The drama is very compelling, but it's also a remarkably funny movie. A nasty streak of gallows humor runs through most of Ti West's films, but this might be his most overtly comedic while never actually spilling over into comedy; all of the jokes are situation and character-based.
 In fact, one of the most dramatic and tense scenes - a prolonged monologue where Pearl opens up to her husband, camera tight on her face (in a fair world this scene would get Goth Oscar attention) is undercut with the pitch-black humor of knowing someone is sitting across the table while she confesses to increasingly awful things.

 When the killing finally starts it's good fun, too. It's not quite as gruesome as in X, but there is some pretty graphic dismemberment that West and his crew somehow manage to make beautiful. There aren't any gags with people saying lines that act as ironic foreshadowing to their deaths as in X, but all the implements of murder are lovingly presented before they're eventually used. The pitchfork even gets a ominous 'shhhhing' sound when it's first wielded; great stuff.
 The music is varied and excellent, full of reedy winds and the occasional carillon. And the acting is all-round excellent, with Mia Goth giving a terrific performance, both unhinged and grounded.

 As for themes, there are some interesting references to cinema itself. A projectionist friend of Pearl shows her an early pornographic film, which of course ties to X, but Pearl is obsessed with escapist musical reels instead; we see her as she imagines herself a few times throughout the movie, both in an extended war-themed musical number and in short, sad (to our eyes) black and white vignettes. Cinema as a release valve from an unpleasant situation in an unpleasant era. And X of course was about the porn boom of the seventies, but also about indie filmmakers not too far from Ti West's heart (just in a different, slightly less respectable genre.)

 All of West's movies have been good to great so far, and this year we got two of his very best yet. Pearl might be my favorite out of the whole lot. He's already working on the capper to this trilogy, so hopefully we'll be able to see what Maxine got up to after ending Pearl's history. Can't wait.