Daddy, daddy, where'd you get them stilts?

LONGLEGS

2024

Written and directed by Osgood Perkins

Spoilers: moderate to high

I can only hope that Longlegs winds up being the worst horror movie I see this year, given there's actually a lot of horror and horror-adjacent stuff coming down the pipe this year that I want to see; time will tell on that, I suppose, but Longlegs might not have even come fully on my radar except for the weird, I suspect rather top-down buzz that's been generated around it, though maybe that buzz would've happened regardless, considering it wound up with an unexpectedly recognizable cast that also isn't comprised of exactly the expected names, except, obviously, for Nicolas Cage.  You can kind of bank on Nicolas Cage showing up anywhere; and as I've resolved to be more embracing of that oddball star, "Nicolas Cage plays the wacky villain in this one, not unlike how he did in the most surprising horror film of last year, Renfield, which I unfairly derogated and dismissed before I even saw it,*" is probably what got my butt in the seat here more than anything else.  Still, I was likewise enthusiastic about seeing indie horror's Scream Queen For a Day back about eight years ago, Maika Monroe, for the first time in a little while, and finding out what she'd make of a more proactive role.  I guess I got about half my money's worth, then.  As for the movie around them, it's more-or-less willfully terrible, another reminder, as if one were needed, that what makes a movie a memetic success is incomprehensible, especially when it comes to modern horror audiences.

I don't know if the "E" word has been floated to describe Longlegs, because the backlash on that is in swing, but it certainly bears the mien of an "elevated horror."  (A grave tone to emphasize the movie's "seriousness," aggressive cinematography and an essentially non-music score that each do the same, a gesturing at themes even if it doesn't have any, an apparent disregard for the limits of your patience, and some light formal play—things kick off with some title credits presented on a retina-searing shade of red, before moving directly into some rounded Academy ratio home movies-style footage, because full-frame equals memory, don't you know—just the feeling that, altogether, the movie is scowling at you even if what it's fundamentally about is the proposition that dolls are creepy.)  It's very strange to see that in the context of something like Longlegs, which is what you'd get at the bottom of a sluice grate after you smashed all 90s and 00s serial killer media, especially Silence of the Lambs, into a paste, and then drained out the resulting fluids for later industrial usage, so much so that the movie is, in fact, set in the 1990s; it's strange because Silence of the Lambs actually is, you know, "elevated horror," arriving many years before such a phrase would be uttered, except for real, in that it has genuine ideas on its mind, and Longlegs isn't even getting to the "exciting thriller" or "well-built aesthetics" part.

It's flying out of my head very quickly even after only two days, so best to get it down on paper what "happens" in the movie, though you could probably imagine most of it from the foregoing.  So: in the 1990s, FBI agent Lee Harker (Monroe) is part of the mass of bodies assigned to a door-to-door investigative campaign, and on a hunch stumbles directly into a killer's house, whereupon her partner's head gets blown off in front of her, though she manages to effect the arrest.  It turns out that she didn't just select that house by accident, and she's a real-deal psychic, with at least some moderate clairvoyant ability.  This garners the attention of her superiors, especially Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), who tests her and brings her onto a case that you might have to be psychic to solve, the "Longlegs" murders committed by a family annihilating serial killer with a very peculiar and indeed seemingly-impossible MO: it is, in fact, always the fathers who kill the families, and the only way they even know that there's one mind behind it all is the letters that they find at each scene, signed with that name, "Longlegs" but otherwise written in crazy Zodiac Killer code.  By some arcane means, our Longlegs (eventually Cage, though the movie starts jumping to Silence of the Lambs Buffalo Bill-style "second protagonist" cutaways by the half hour mark, albeit without, actually, having that second protagonist in the form of a senator's daughter) has compelled these men to kill, but Carter sure doesn't know how.  Harker will find out, and she cracks Longlegs' code—though only because Longlegs actually visits her and provides a key—and that gets them to a point where they are able to start following his traces to earlier, previously-unconnected crimes.  At last they get a pinpoint on Longlegs himself, and I'll stop here, out of conscientiousness, even if I think you could probably figure it out.

That doesn't sound all that bad so far—generic as shit, but it could go either way—and the biggest snag is the extreme emphasis placed on Harker's psychic powers early on, powers that amount to so very little throughout that they're a bizarre distraction even before the movie's gotten fully bad.  It becomes very destabilizing once it has gotten bad, because it's rarely ever been used in a fun way (actual police procedure and detection would've been more fun at every turn, and obviously would've been less lazy), and it gets forgotten as easily as it does because it was never actually necessary: writer-director Osgood Perkins's screenplay gins up an entirely different vector for Harker to achieve a personal insight into this case, and I'll spoil it just a little bit (not least because it's made obvious enough) to mention that Harker, how about this, is actually a former victim of Longlegs.  Her and her mother (Alicia Witt) are the only ones who ever survived, and this turns out to have been what we were looking at back in that Academy ratio prologue with the little girl with the camera who was having a scary conversation with an unnervingly awkwardly-framed Cage.

Once we realize this, this dominoes into an even more obvious "twist" that Perkins withholds for no earthly reason—so long that I'd have become irritated just on this basis alone—and the "psychic" thing falls pretty much totally by the wayside, its single most salient contribution to the film being just the most underwhelmingly cheesy CGI effect you've ever seen when her power goes away.  Though it's not even as bad as the related CGI effects shot of a smoldering doll's head, which means this $10 million movie didn't have the means or moxie, apparently, to set a prop doll on fire.  I'll give it this: the film's only effective jump scare is a twelve-frame psychic flash played with abrasive kaleidoscopic colors, but I wouldn't call that "worth it," and Harker's abilities are less usefully psychic than Will Graham's dumb hyper-empathy, which at least had the decency to pretend to be science.  Worst of all, it emphasizes what a damnably ramshackle thing this script is at every single level: I think I might've actually slapped my forehead when Carter loudly disclaims that Longlegs himself could be in any sense supernatural or paranormal or "voodoo" when, just, fuck, man, you're talking to somebody you only brought onto your team because you think she has psychic powers.  So in that respect you wouldn't guess what happens in Longlegs, because given the same elements presented in the first twenty minutes of the film, you'd probably assume that the killer would be psychic too, and hence you'd have something along the lines of a game of telepathic cat-and-mouse against the headwinds of a disbelieving FBI.  I think I just pitched a better early-aughts CBS drama than Longlegs' early-aughts CBS drama without meaning to.

So by the end it's a really senseless, sterile exercise in "serial killer media," very happily about absolutely nothing, but eager to take on the accoutrements of severity rather than wallow in the basic enjoyability of madperson murderers and irresponsible grodiness, and starting somewhere in the middle the story begins its slide from potentially good, to boring, to insultingly stupid, to—finally—actual slop.  It doesn't even feel like a person wrote this script, the way it adheres plot points together with some immensely substandard plot glue—I've mentioned the dolls a couple of times already, but once it's unveiled what they're for, and who's using them, and how they get into the victims' homes in the first place ("a gift from the church"—what church? this is America, five people on the same block all go to different churches if they go to church at all), it becomes obvious that nobody is even trying, and every single thing we see in this movie is now going to be a contrivance calculated to get to the ending Perkins for some reason wants, so he's just hoping that his movie's downhill slope has been made sufficiently steep and lubricated that his bullshit will roll all the way to the bottom without it getting hung up.  But, the thing is, horror movies can have bad endings and even whole bad third acts, if they've gathered enough goodwill on the journey, and Longlegs doesn't even do that.

It's pretty much kind of bad right away: the ludicrous overprosecution of tone is part of that—it's not even totally humorless, there are jokes sometimes, but these are rare breaks—though the worse part is that, to support that tone, the visuals are also the most sullen thing you've ever seen.  Perkins and his cinematographer Andres Arochi will go ten minute stretches of this movie—even across different scenes!—where the only color is this ungodly dull sodium yellow bouncing off of mahogany walls and getting swallowed by underlit obscurity, lighting that isn't even justified by the light sources on screen (it's all piss filters), like the flashlights or lamps or overhead fluorescent lights.  When it's daylight it's at least normal ugly in its log file-looking undersaturation, though I can't think of a more forceful condemnation of a movie than to say I was happy to see it return to ordinarily bad cinematography; there's some minor ways that Perkins is framing and Arochi is lensing singles that feel legitimately interesting in how the actors limbs get stretched a bit—arms, mind you, and I've actually got no idea why this is called "Longlegs"—but that's about the limit, and mostly the aesthetic made me want to take a nap.  Monroe's performance is kind of the human-shaped version of that; any eagerness I had to see her was extinguished rapidly, and while she's clearly giving the performance Perkins asked for, I have no idea why Perkins would ask for this awkward thing, that with the utmost charity is reaching for "traumatized" or "socially inept," but she's hitting full-on "malfunctioning robot," and she's tedious as hell to watch, for literally no benefit to her film since "Lee Harker" is by no means an "actual character."  Underwood and Witt are weirdly mannered, too, and in somewhat more successful ways, but it means the movie has effectively no human anchor.

That leaves nothing but Cage, and Cage is... good, and the recipient of the only decent scenes in the movie (not all of them are in fact good scenes, but they are, without exception, the best scenes, and most are good).  If "90s serial killer media" hadn't occurred to you yet, by the time Cage's full face is on the screen, it would be almost unavoidable; it's essentially the result of going for broke, 90s serial killer media and especially Silence of the Lambs-wise, without verbally confirming the transphobic implications, so you can sort of pretend Cage's white-haired matronly figure is actually an aged-out glam rocker if you really wanted to, and there are even elements of that in Cage's vocalizations, but we should probably be serious people here.  Still, it's something, which is manna from heaven in a movie that is otherwise nothing—I wonder how effective it would be in an environment where the other actors actually resembled people!—and it cuts wholly against the grain of the depressive, unpleasant miasma that Longlegs is in every other respect of its construction, to have its villain being this kind of unhinged Satan-worshipping cartoon, shrieking like a banshee about "MOMMEEEEE" and "DADDEEEEE" and baby-talking about "the Downstairs Man."  As perhaps the only avenue for actual horror flick fun the movie possesses, at least Perkins realized what he had; Longlegs is sparingly-used but given his rightful priority with the film's most brutal gore shock.  This movie is awful in almost every way, but the silver lining is that, if anything, it's only strengthened my commitment to my new Cage Policy.

Score: 3/10

*So "not unlike" in that regard that both Cage's Dracula and Cage's Longlegs share an identical final line.