Ti West’s X trilogy is a horror series that follows the intertwined stories of two women, Maxine Minx and Pearl, across different timelines, exploring their intertwined desires for fame and fortune. The trilogy includes the 1979-set slasher “X,” its 1918-set prequel “Pearl,” and the 1985-set sequel “MaXXXine,” which concludes Maxine’s story as she navigates the Los Angeles film industry.
Ti West’s “X” Trilogy promised a resurrection of retro slasher thrills, but despite arriving with plenty of marketing muscle and critical hype, it fails to leave much of a mark beyond surface-level homage. What starts as a knowing wink at genre conventions in X quickly devolves into repetition and self-parody by the time MaXXXine screeches to its undercooked finale.
Let’s start with the obvious: all three films are deeply derivative, mining the visual and tonal language of classic horror decades past. X borrows liberally from “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Friday the 13th,” ticking boxes rather than reimagining scares for a modern audience. “Pearl” tosses “The Wizard of Oz” into a blood-stained blender with Technicolor flair, but the spectacle fades fast when you realize the story is spinning its wheels. “MaXXXine,” for all its L.A. excess and attempts at style, is the most egregious—a patchwork of references that feels more like a stitched-together pastiche than a living, breathing film.
Pacing is a persistent problem in all three installments. Each movie stretches thin ideas well beyond their breaking point, with long stretches of wheel-spinning dialogue and languid scene-setting where nothing much happens. When the action finally arrives—especially in “MaXXXine”—it’s rushed, anticlimactic, and stunningly predictable. For a supposed trilogy capstone, the third film is a creative dead-end, lacking not only the vibrant energy but also the substance that made the earlier entries at least interesting in fits and starts. The vibrancy and inventiveness that marked “X,” shaky as it may have been, are entirely absent in “MaXXXine”’s neon wasteland.
Perhaps most frustrating is how the trilogy loses sight of what made its first entry promising. There was a glimmer of clever meta-commentary in “X,” but by “MaXXXine,” the self-awareness is shallow and unearned—a hollow echo of more innovative films. The series sets itself up as a commentary on filmmaking, fame, and identity, only to skitter away from any real insight. Deeper psychological exploration is constantly teased and then dropped, especially in the undercooked thread about Maxine’s father. These characters rarely move beyond archetypes, leaving you to wonder what makes them tick beyond the demands of the plot.
As a horror trilogy, Ti West’s project is curiously bloodless where it should count: inventive scares and central mysteries feel rote rather than surprising, and even the violence—once the genre’s bread and butter—lands with a shrug. These are movies more interested in imitating the look and feel of their influences than in carving out an identity of their own.
By the end, the “X” trilogy doesn’t just pay tribute to slasher classics—it becomes a parody of itself, mistaking references and style for substance. Rather than offering a bold new take on retro horror, all three films settle for pastiche, and “MaXXXine” in particular closes out the series with a whimper when the series needed a bang.
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