‘MaXXXine’ Is Punch-Drunk on Pastiche

Give Ti West this: He’s completed the quickest trilogy in contemporary horror movie history. Barely two years after X introduced us to its gore-soaked version of the MCU—that’d be the Maxine Cinematic Universe, named for the ornery and resourceful would-be-porn-star-cum-Final-Girl embodied by Mia Goth—West has jerry-rigged a triptych whose conceptual sturdiness and artistic merit are, if far from certain, at least worthy of debate. With the release of MaXXXine, the question is whether West has truly succeeded in carving out a niche of his own or whether his series is just a (figuratively) bloodless exercise in received themes and aesthetics.