✝️I watched Maxxxine! Does this series close out on a high note?…✝️
As always friends, spoilers are under the cut!…
Let me just say this movie was a banger of an ending!!
The movie has so many little references to its predecessors specifically the movie pearl. Seeing Theda Bara’s star, soldiers marching on set, pearl’s dance being recreated by a young Maxine, and even some parallels between Pearl’s audition and Maxine’s the difference being Maxine walks out confident and telling the other girls they might as well just go home instead of in tears.
In this movie we see the trauma Maxine has from her time in Texas. She has somewhat frequent flashbacks to the events. Seeing Pearl in that window, feeling Pearl assault her, even seeing her friends pass on. All of this Maxine has to compartmentalize she has no time to ruminate or work through it she has to keep moving forward.
I will say while I loved this movie the twist at the end isn’t hard to spot. Atleast it wasn’t to me. Her father makes a return and tries exorcising Maxine for his own film about the corruption of Hollywood on their children. We see sprinkles of it through the movie the biggest hint to me was hearing his voice in the introduction recording of a young Max, and seeing signs about Hollywood stealing their children. Plus he was a loose end that needed wrapped up.
The aesthetics of the movie were phenomenal. I really felt wrapped up in all this warm hazy Hollywood 80s glamour and glow. The shininess and dinginess of it all makes it really captivating. It was almost shocking when the haze and glamour got ripped from us when violence started. Seeing this sort of underbelly to it all. That like the director Maxine works for says that things were just as shitty and awful back then as they are now. A man follows Maxine into an alleyway and pulls a knife on her only to immediately cower when she pulls a gun on him. She flips the tables and makes him strip, suck her gun, and lay on the ground only for her to turn his balls into hamburger meat under her heel.
Throughout the movie there’s this self preservation aspect that I noticed. Not only is Maxine defending herself repeatedly from these men who want to take advantage of her and harm her (the guy in the alley and this skeezy detective that works for her dad) but also her desperately needing this real acting role. The director tells her she needs to act as if her life depends on this role and Maxine tells her bluntly that it actually does. Maxine never has time to sit down and process what happened in Texas or work through it…but then again do we always get the time to perfectly work through our traumas? Maxine takes things into her own hands, pushes herself, and outwardly tells the cops when her coworkers start turning up dead that they need to save themselves.
When all is said and done I loved the movie and loved the end however I couldn’t help but feel…not fully satisfied. I wanted max to get a happy ending and she does for sure but there’s this whole narrative about the past coming back to bite you and we see her dad again but once he’s taken care of there’s no aknowledgement of what happened in Texas. There’s note that people know about it and police have been investigating it…but there’s no tie off to whether they drop it or what happens to Maxine because of the investigation…it’s just brought up by her father over and over and then kind of dropped.
All in all a killer watch. I didn’t really feel it had a whodunnit feel like some people had said but it definitely had a mystery going for it.
10/10 pentagram brands ⭐️