Pearl (2022)

“Strange Darling” can do straightforward brutality with the best of them. And yet, throughout the film, the actors’ playful portrayal — dipping in and out of an ever-shifting dynamic that seems too complicated to write down, let alone embody — recalls something like Mia Goth’s dazzling performance in “Pearl.” Fitzgerald tests her endurance in some delicately drawn-out one-shots, while Gallner makes his bid for small-time scream king armed with a shotgun and an assuredness that feels like its own assault.

MaXXXine likewise undermines the core strength of X and Pearl (both 2022), which were, for all the gimmicky pastiche employed by writer-director Ti West, credible underdog fantasies that knew they had a star on their hands with Mia Goth.

All of this is to say that Murphy has been infiltrating, for a while now, the same themes and time period that Ti West’s Maxxxine—the third film in a trilogy that rounds out X and Pearl—explores through the same horror/slasher-tinged lens.

Maxine is shark-like in her single-minded pursuit of fame, but compared to her unhinged counterpart in Pearl, she’s a relatively bland brand of psycho.

Although Maxine’s audition gives Goth her only real chance to flex, it’s nowhere near the wondrous closing moments West affords her in Pearl (2022), where Goth stars as the traumatized perpetrator who would terrorize the porno film crew decades later in X.