The horror trilogy that writer-director Ti West launched with the 2022 release of X and concludes (presumably) with the new feature MaXXXine doesn’t lack for ambition. The broader narrative of the three films spans decades, and each installment is stylistically tilted in the direction of the era in which it’s set. X had the raw viciousness of nineteen-seventies fare such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and its follow-up, Pearl, adopted a more melancholy tone and delicate visual palette that evoked old Hollywood melodramas. MaXXXine is set in 1985, and it’s awash in spatter and sleaze, like something extracted forcibly from the id of Brian De Palma’s Body Double.

West’s new film follows Maxine Minx (series mainstay Mia Goth), an aspiring actress who’s been earning her living in pornography, peep shows, and other similar endeavors. Her dreams of legit movie stardom are suddenly within reach when her intensity and bravado in an audition land her the lead role in a horror sequel titled The Puritan II. The film’s imperious director, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) insists she will bring artistic heft to the film and is pointed in her instructions to Maxine. The director took a major chance on the actress, and Maxine better not falter. That simple and fair demand becomes more difficult to achieve when some secrets from Maxine’s past start to emerge, an unwelcome intrusion that just so happens to correspond with people in her circle being murdered in grisly fashion.

West commits to unflinching nastiness in his storytelling (Maxine dispatches a would-be assailant by crushing his scrotum, which is shown in graphic detail), but there’s a surprising lack of tension to the film. It’s a strange lapse for West, who generally handles that element of horror filmmaking with consummate skill; his 2009 breakthrough, The House of the Devil, was basically ninety minutes of sustained dread. Scenes play out with an off-putting artificiality, as if West is instinctually drawn to giving MaXXXine an edge of satire but can’t quite bring himself to abandon sincere homage. The performances are similarly confused. It seems like West gave the whole cast the green light to joyfully overact, with decidedly mixed results: Bobby Cannavale is entertaining as a police detective who once toyed with becoming an actor, while Kevin Bacon is tediously squirrelly as a slimy New Orleans private eye. Goth, who gave a stunning performance in Pearl, gets lost in it all. Despite a few showy moments, her Maxine is so thinly defined that she often comes across as a bystander in her own film.

There’s a loose, chockablock quality to Maxxxine that is the core of its undoing. West throws loads of plot details and flittering characters into the film without finding a way to make it all gel into a satisfying whole. As the capper to a longer cinematic trek, it’s more obligation than art.