MaXXXine ending explained: How horror movie’s final shot links back to Pearl

Warning! This article contains major spoilers for MaXXXine. If you’ve yet to see the movie, and don’t want to know anything that happens, turn back now!

MaXXXine director Ti West has made no secret of the fact that he purposefully made each installment in his popular horror series, the fan-dubbed X trilogy, feel like entirely different movies. But, as with any franchise, there’s bound to be some connective tissue…

While Pearl veered off course dramatically, taking viewers back to 1918 as it explored its protagonist’s (murderous) attempts to break free of her small town and become famous, MaXXXine follows on from the original, and reunites us with Mia Goth’s dreamer, who’s just booked her first Hollywood gig. As the lone survivor of the Texas farm massacre six years ago, a haunted but determined Maxine is forced to face her past as she films The Puritan II, a blood-soaked sequel helmed by Elizabeth Debicki’s cutthroat director Elisabeth Bender. 

The movie’s final sequence sees Maxine reveling in her newfound stardom, having aced her role and taken down the serial killer who’s been terrorizing LA. Though there’s slightly more to it than that, which we dive into below…

“I always had in my mind as [her] having made it in Hollywood. That was such a goal for her, was to become a star,” West said of the surprisingly rosy conclusion, before explaining how the slasher’s final shot brings together X and Pearl. (MaXXXine ends with Bender and Maxine watching a monitor on set, as a camera pans into Maxine’s severed head and holds the frame, before the real film’s credits start rolling over the static image).

“There’s something about the end of Pearl, about her smiling and trying to keep smiling, that’s representative of the movie as a whole,” he told USA Today. “There’s something about this severed head on the bed being photographed that’s representative of the absurdity of it all as well.”

So, what actually happened at the end of MaXXXine?

(Image credit: A24)

As teased by its trailers, MaXXXine is much more of a murder mystery than its predecessors, as the titular character pursues a legitimate acting career while those around her fall victim to a seemingly Satanic slayer. The Night Stalker, as the murderer is dubbed, has been frightening youngsters up and down the Hills for weeks, but it’s not until Maxine books her first lead role in a proper feature that the horrors start affecting her personally.

First, two of her sex work pals are found dead in a lake, both will pentagrams burned into their bodies, before her bestie (Moses Sumney), who works at the video store below her apartment, is butchered, too. With that, Maxine arouses the suspicions of homicide detectives Williams (Michelle Monaghan) and Torres (Bobby Cannavale), who come sniffing around asking for her help but quickly get rebuffed by the aspiring actor.

At the same time, Maxine finds herself being pestered by Bacon’s John Labat, who says he’s been hired by a powerful man to track her down and invite her to a swanky party in the Hollywood Hills.

When her efforts to avoid the chaos wind up interfering with her work, Maxine enlists the help of her agent-turned-lawyer Teddy (Giancarlo Esposito) and her porn director Shephard (Uli Latukefu) to kill Labat. The trio bait Labat into chasing her through a night club, then apprehend him out back and take him to a junkyard. There, they trap Labat inside a car, before flattening the vehicle with him still inside.

Later, racked by guilt over her inaction in the case, Maxine realizes that her two female friends and her missing co-star Molly Bennett all said they were going to a fancy event up on the hills before they vanished, which leads Maxine to fish out the party invitation and drive out to 166 Starlight Avenue.

(Image credit: Universal Pictures)

There, she quite literally stumbles on Molly’s dismembered body, and learns that the person behind the killings is her estranged father, Ernest, who couldn’t bear the fact that she’d moved away from the church and succumbed to a life of sin in Hollywood. He’d been disguising his “punishments” as crimes of the Night Stalker’s, who turns out to be nothing more than a red herring. 

Determined to make a movie of his own that exposes the industry’s corrupt ways, Ernest and his cronies strap Maxine up to a pole outside and goad her, but their “production” is interrupted by Williams and Torres. A shootout ensues, with Ernest fleeing into the hills as Williams and Torres manage to execute his cohorts. The detective duo pursue Ernest, as Maxine frees herself and picks up a shotgun left by one of her father’s deceased allies, following them out into the greenery. 

In the hills, Torres is fatally shot, while Williams gets stabbed in the eye, leaving Maxine to finish her pops off. As a police helicopter circles above, its passengers ordering her to drop her weapon, she tells her dad that he’s the reason she’s where she is in life, and that his “divine intervention” set on the path to fame and fortune. During her speech, Maxine imagines herself conducting celebrity interviews, where she’s praised for her work in The Puritan II and for stopping her father, as she’s asked about the biopic of her life that is currently in the works.

When she returns to set a month later, Maxine is met with a round of applause from the cast and crew before Bender whisks her away to show her the severed head. As she looks at the prop adoringly, Maxine tells Bender that she “never wants it to end”.

MaXXXine is in cinemas now. For more on the movie, check out our interviews with Mia Goth and Ti West.