Longlegs (2024)

Rated R for being fairly brutal and demonic.  Take the tone of Silence of the Lambs and add the devil to it.  That's the entire parental guide that I need for the movie.  Both movies spend a lot of time freaking you out about what you aren't seeing and then proceeds to show you some of the most upsetting imagery you'll see in a movie.  There's a pretty gory unique suicide in the movie that is pretty memorable and scarring.  Because it is a bit demonic, it also hits some pretty blasphemous points along the way as well.  While I can't think of language, I'm sure it's throughout.  You know a movie is pretty messed up if you can't remember if there is any swearing in it despite the idea that there is probably swearing throughout.

DIRECTOR:  Osgood Perkins

Do you understand how tempted I was to spend my New Year's Day writing about Longlegs?  Ring in the New Year with the previous year's most disturbing movie?  I know that people lost their minds about Longlegs last year and I'm glad that I was able to see it within the year it came out.  I got lucky at the library and there was a couple of copies ready to be checked out.  While I think that this movie would have spoken to me at a different age better, I can't say that it is a bad movie.

I will say that the movie is more frustrating than people made it out to be.  Before I go too far, I do want to talk about Nicholas Cage in the movie.  I know that his entire thing going on here is pretty polarizing.  For those who don't know, Cage is wearing a hilarious amount of makeup.  He's wearing so much makeup that you often aren't sure that you are actually watching Nicholas Cage as the eponymous villain of the piece.  For some people, his distracting look took them out of the movie.  Not me.  I kind of dug it.  He looks very creepy.  I like the fact that he looks a little inhuman, mirroring the motif of the dolls running throughout the movie.  To a certain extent, we're getting what even Cage acknowledges as "The Full Cage".  But I think that this performance is a bit different from what we've seen when he gives hellbent performances.  This one is weird, but it really works for what the movie is offering.  He's so unhinged with his performance, it makes Longlegs someone to absolutely fear because you don't know if the character has any limits or any social norms.  Anything that this character does is in character because of Cage's performance.  So, if you are wondering if Cage's performance had anything to do with my tepid response to the movie, I assure you, it's not it.

I really have to rewatch Silence of the Lambs again.  Right when I first was allowed to watch R-Rated movies, I gravitated to Silence of the Lambs.  It seemed so rebellious and culturally open at the time.  I went for the deep end of the getting scared pool real fast.  Now, I was in the snobby horror stuff already.  I mean, Hannibal Lecter seemed so classy.  It's why I know the terms "Bach's Goldberg Variations."  Namedrop that at a party and you might get some traction.  But that got me reading the Lecter books by Thomas Harris.  I got really into them.  Part of it came from the idea that these were both horrors and thrillers.  Soon, I realized that really great thrillers got you to treat the protagonist as an avatar.  If you can solve the crime before the investigator can, you are saving the character's life.  Sure, there have been many a thriller where I don't solve who the killer is or I make the same mistake that the hero makes.  But I tended to love that kind of investment.  It's kind of why I love the Scream franchise so much.  I throw myself into that world and try to solve the case with everyone else.  

But Longlegs kind of teases the idea that this is a mystery to be solved when it absolutely breaks all the rules of a thriller midway through the movie.  I mean, it doesn't break them break them.  From early on in the movie, we know that the protagonist may be a supernatural detective with mild psychic powers.  The way that the movie describes her is "half-psychic".  So we have to grant that the movie is also going to be half-supernatural.  But I'm going to go as far as to say the whole movie is supernatural and I can't do anything with that.  The answer for the entire film comes down to information that you could not have gleaned given the clues you received.  Yet, those clues are presented to us as if they are supposed to mean something.  For example, the movie makes a meal out of the this ball that is found in a doll's head.  It makes an ethereal howl when massaged.  The forensic pathologist stresses that he can take the ball apart and they'd find nothing.  It's presented much like Clarice Starling finding the Death's Head moth in Silence of the Lambs.  (Note:  The only movie that I'm bad at presenting the whole name of the movie is The Silence of the Lambs.  I don't know why I have to drop the definitive article every time I talk about this specific movie.) But it comes out to nothing really.

So, this means that my investment doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of things.   What it then comes down to is the horror aspect.  If you are looking for the visual horror of what the movie can offer, then Longlegs probably delivers.  That wasn't what I was looking for.  It's not that I hate devil movies.  After all, I kind of dug Late Night with the Devil recently, so I know that you can make a devil movie pretty darned good.  It's just that I want my devil movies to be about the protagonist.  As much as I love Lee Harker as a character, nothing is really Lee's fault.  I mean, the movie tries to make the events of the film her fault.  Her mother, in an attempt to save her (which seems dubious) from Longlegs, agreed to be his harbinger of death.  It's all very "Blame Lee although Lee would have no way of understanding this."  It's also cryptic whether or not Lee remembers any of this.  Like, the movie introduces that she is intuitive to the point of being psychic.  But it almost betrays that first act of the film for the fact that she might just be remembering something that might have been repressed for the majority of the film.  

The funny thing, there is a way to make this movie far more appealing to me.  Lee Harker is given so much significance in this movie.  The entire story is basically her story in an Oedipal way.  (Not like she's in love with a parent, but the course of her investigation reveals that she is the lynchpin of the crime.)   Now, I think I had the same problem with Smile.  The protagonist of the movie is thrown into a hellish scenario where people around her are dying horrible deaths.  The monster is obsessed with her.  Now, with Silence of the Lambs, Clarice isn't the center of the story.  She stays entirely in the world of the investigation until she confronts Buffalo Bill at the end.  The crime isn't about Clarice; the investigation is.  But with Longlegs, they are one in the same.  With both Smile and Longlegs, the protagonist is put through the wringer for doing nothing wrong.  I tend to think that the horrors of a movie should reflect a mistake on the part of the protagonist.  Now, Lee makes a mistake fairly early in the movie.  When Longlegs is stalking her at her home, she doesn't report that.  I kept waiting for that shoe to drop.  Her need for independence and solitude is enough of a character flaw that we had the chance for a character arc when it came to growing throughout the film.  Like, if she learned to accept help from others, leading to the downfall of the villain, then we would have gotten something to root for in Lee.  But Lee is never really called out on her silence.  No one ever discovers that Longlegs came to her house.  For all of the tragic things that happen in the final act, none of it comes down to something that Lee did wrong.  

If anything, it didn't matter that Lee investigated any of these things.  The tragedies that this movie presents to its main characters seem to be irrevocable.  If anything, the more talented and the wiser that the protagonists are, the worse off they end up.  Really, the movie follows the structure of a Paranormal Activity movie more than a thriller at all.  The beginning of the film is trying to figure out the rules of the atrocity.  A lot of talking happens and a general spookiness exists.  The final act is about torturing the protagonist for not really doing anything but investigating too much.  I would like to point out, I burnt out on the Paranormal Activity movies pretty quickly as well.   (But because I'm a completionist, I always consider revisting these movies in an attempt to be the guy who has seen everything.) 

I kind of want to talk about a commentary on gender that I don't know is fully fleshed out or not.  Lee Harker seems put upon.  I'm pretty sure that the movie takes place during the Clinton administration.  I got a pretty silly joy seeing that everyone in the movie was patriotic enough to put up portraits of the current president to let us know what era we were in at what time.  But we have a woman who is as diminutive as can be partnered with an overly confident epitome of masculinity.  Now, there are times that I want to throat punch Agent Carter for the way that he talks to Harker throughout the film.  But the movie needs Carter for anything in this movie to get done.  As much as I'm on Team Harker for figuring out everything in this movie, her painful isolation and (I'm really not trying to be crass) spectrumy approach to FBI investigations seems impractical.  She simply portrays misery.  I mean, this is a movie where the devil convinces suburban men to murder their families and then commit suicide.  There's a gender narrative going on in the movie.  Maybe that comes from the real statistic that men tend to be serial killers.  More than just men, but white men.  But Carter becomes one of Longlegs's victims, murdering his wife.  Carter is a Black man.  I want this movie to be more explicit with its messaging if it exists.  If it doesn't exist, well then gosh darn it...I want it to exist.

It all comes back to imagery.  I don't want devil movies to just be devil movies.  While the spookiness was on point, I want the movie to have something to say about the devil.  I want it to be someone's fault that the devil is here.  This is a bit of an excuse for Osgood Perkins to do absolutely outstanding visuals.  But some of the stuff feels unearned.  I wanted to be able to figure out how to get that point.  Instead, I just get a scary movie.  As a scary movie, it's very scary.  I like that.  But it doesn't scratch my brain the way that a good devil movie should.  Visually great; narratively only okay.