Longlegs

FBI Agent Lee Harker is assigned to an unsolved serial killer case that takes her to some unexpected places, when she discovers that she has a personal connection to the killer.

Lee Harker is a recent FBI agent, as well as a potentially "gifted" psychic, when she is assigned to a long-unsolved cold case involving a serial killer known as Longlegs.

Longlegs' preferred method of murder is to target families with young daughters who were born on the 14th, and to then murder the whole family. Afterwards, they leave cryptic occult messages at the crime scenes. Lost in the dusty case files, and with the help of her psychic abilities, which mostly seems to be "trusting her gut," Lee manages to decipher the strange messages that Longlegs had left behind at the various crime scenes. It turns out, the reason that she is able to do this is because Longlegs actually visited her as a child, but for some reason, the killer decided to spare her, even though she was born on the 14th too.

Lee’s investigation point to a horrifying truth… Longlegs is still active.

Plagued by questions, as repressed memories are slowly unlocking, and following her intuition, Lee is able to capture Longlegs, but during her interrogation, he kills himself. Desperate, Lee follows the teasing clues the killer left behind, and the trail leads her straight to her mother’s home. Here, Lee discovers that not only has her mother been working with Longlegs for years, aiding him in his killings, but he has also been living in her mom's basement. Apparently, they have a system, Longlegs builds creepy dolls, embuing them with the spirit of Satan, which Lee's mom then delivers to the houses that have daughters born on the 14th. After that, the little devil-doll does its best impersonation of Grima Wormtongue and convinces the Dad to kill their whole families, and then themselves.

Also, this whole partnership between her mother and Longlegs is how her mother got Longlegs to spare Lee all those years ago.

Betrayed and angry, Lee finds one last clue, and it points to Longlegs' next victim... the young daughter of her boss. Lee races to get to his house, because it's the 14th, and he is celebrating his daughter's birthday. But she is too late. Lee's mother has already arrived, and she has delivered Longlegs' doll, which has already possessed Lee's boss, and he has already killed his wife.

Left with no other option, while protecting the young girl, Lee is forced to shoot not just her boss, but her mom too. But before the credits roll, we see that Lee is out of bullets and so, she is not able to shoot the doll, which has now turned its attention on her.

In the run-up to its release in theatres, the marketing for this film described Longlegs as "the scariest film of the decade" and that’s never a good idea. Because no matter what, whether the claim is actually true or not, whether it's even scary or not, that is the kind of broad statement that is only going to hurt the way that the audience responds to the film.

Especially when the film turns out to be more creepy than scary.

Because if there's one thing that you can say about Longlegs... it's creepy as fuck. Super creepy. It's creepy in the way that old sepia-toned family photographs from the 70s and 80s feel when they show up in True Crime documentaries. It's creepy like how it felt to watch movies like The Watcher in the Woods when you happened to catch it on TV on a random Saturday afternoon as a kid, while you were all alone in the house. It's creepy, and that creepiness is very purposely exaggerated in the film's world too. It leans hard into the grimy 1970s/1980s feel of its whole look, all of which is bolstered by an oppressive dream-like quality to the way everything is shot, the kind of dream that is always threatening to become a nightmare.

But that's kind of the problem here... Longlegs is generally more threat than it is delivery. The story seems to pull back right before everything really connects, and the horror seems to pull back right before things get really gruesome, it’s all more a constant feeling of dread than actual horror. It’s tension without release. Watching the film is a lot like you're standing on the edge, but you never get to jump. This is exemplified by the way it ends on a cliffhanger, where we're left wondering if Lee will escape the devil's curse, her family‘s terrible legacy, will she be able to break the cycle, will she be able to save the girl, or will she fall, and carry on Longlegs' sinister work? Will the doll get her to kill the girl, and then herself?

Will... Satan!... ultimately triumph?

This feels like it should be the climax of the film, providing the satisfaction of an actual ending, but we don't get it. Fade to black. Roll credits. Disappointing isn't the right word. Incomplete? Unfulfilling? Unsatisfying? Whatever it is, it certainly makes the possibility of a second watch much less likely. Which is too bad, because otherwise, it's a great film. It looks great, it's definitely atmospheric and creepy.

It just doesn't really deliver.

That said, Nicolas Cage–Generation X's greatest living actor–as always, is truly giving his all to this role, and just loving every single moment of it. It's definitely the kind of thing that is right up his alley too. He is 100% a weirdo in this movie as the title character Longlegs, a Satan-worshipping serial killer whose seems to have been inspired by the singer Tiny Tim, with a little bit of Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs thrown in for good measure.

Apparently, he's called “The Longlegs Killer" because in the opening scene, Longlegs crouches down to talk to Lee when she was a child, and says to her: “It seems I wore my long legs today.” There's your title, as well as the whole reason for his name, I guess. He has long legs. She has short legs. How that moment then translated into his official serial killer nom de plume in the FBI file—especially as this happened when Lee and Longlegs first met, a moment which was presumably kept secret from everyone, even Lee, after a fashion, as her mother then made a secret deal with the killer soon after it happened—or why it stayed as Longlegs' main nickname for the rest of his career as a serial killer...?

I have no idea.

The strangest thing about the whole film for me, is that while it's generally unsatisfying, and doesn't comes together, at the same time, it also definitely over-explains things using long exposition-dumps. Not only that, but afterwards, those monologues are then followed by scenes that basically cover the same ground, but instead of telling us, it shows us. It feels strange to say that a film ultimately feels too timid, that it pulled back too much, that it seemed like it didn't want to commit to its own set-up, while at the same time pointing out that sometimes, especially in horror films, less is more, but I guess this is my whole problem with Longlegs... it's just weirdly unsatisfying, and probably because you can almost see a better version lurking in there somewhere.

On top of all that, it’s difficult to pin down exactly what it is the film is trying to say, especially when the characters are so underdeveloped and 2-D, and this is all in spite of some fantastic performances. Not just Cage, but Maika Monroe as Agent Lee, and Alicia Witt as Ruth Harker, and Kiernan Shipka as a survivor of Longlegs, a young woman who is completely broken. These are all some great, full-throated performances, but otherwise, the rest of the film clearly falls far short of the filmmaker's ambitions.

There’s definitely something here about the dynamics between a parent and child, and how parents will sometimes keep things from their children, how a parent will lie to their children, because they believe they are acting in the child's best interest, that they're protecting them. It could also maybe be saying something about how, as you grow up, you begin to realize certain things about your parents, and how, even if this doesn’t lead to you understanding them better, then at least you begin to see that they are just people too. This kind of realization could be seen as a kind of loss of innocence, a lot like realizing that there is no Santa. It's not a large step to then see the death of the child and their family in the film as being a metaphor of sorts for the death of a child's innocence and the family relationship, but to what end? What's it saying about that? I don’t know.

Is the film also making some kind of statement about how the lengths a parent might go to when they’re "protecting" their child, at the same time, could also end up preventing that child from truly growing up? Maybe. Is there also something here about the inherent evil of the patriarchy? Could be. Is there maybe an homage to Bram Stroker's Dracula here too, in the use of the Harker name? I don't know, but you'd think in a horror film that making the choice to name your protagonist Harker would have to be deliberate, right?

Questions, questions, questions, and so few satisfying answers…

Longlegs is a well-made enough film, and yet so weirdly unsatisfying, that I did some googling around, and the writer/director Oz Perkins–son of actor Anthony Perkins, the star of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho–gave some interviews, saying:

“That comes down to my growing up with a famous father who was a closested gay man. And that fact didn’t fit the narrative of my family. My mom became a part of the cover. It’s a strange thing to live in a cover.” 

In these interviews, he goes on to basically explain that all the FBI/crime procedural stuff, all the satan/serial killer stuff, it's all just window dressing over what the film is actually about, and that Longlegs is really about discovering that a parent has lied to you because they believe they’re protecting you, and whether or not that's fair, or all that healthy, and what you do when you faced with this truth. So, knowing that this was the intent, you can see it. Sure. You can see how it could be said that Longlegs is really all about Lee's trauma, and how she processes it, and the question of how she deals with it moving forward in her life.

Will her future be defined by her past?

That's great, but the problem for me is that Longlegs asks these questions. It doesn’t answer them. And sure, often times, that's the point of art. It's sometimes less about making a definitive statement, and more about getting people thinking, consdering, questioning, right? I get that.

But in narrative fiction, that can sometimes make for a really unsatisfying story.

So, yeah, Longlegs is a weird film. It's unpredictable. It's foreboding. It's good looking. It's sometimes funny. It's definitely creepy. But ultimately, I found it to be a bit hollow. I enjoyed it. But was it "good?” Was it truly "the scariest film of the decade?"

...No.

Your mileage may vary.

There's only one way to find out, right?