Flasz On Film

If you’d like to recommend Longlegs, or any movie for that matter, to a typical FilmTwitterer these days, all you need to make sure to remember is that the movie in question is produced by A24 or Neon, or that Nicolas Cage is in it. And while you’re at it, you might as well lean in and whisper into their ear that not only is Cage in the movie, but he also goes big in it. Hook, line and sinker. Sold. Throw in a few lines comparing the movie to something like Hereditary and you’ve got yourself a winner. A guaranteed box office juggernaut ready to ten-ex its budget in twelve seconds flat.  

However, what you might end up doing while selectively choosing how to pitch a movie like Longlegs to someone who is already primed to get excited about very specific bits of information that you—with cunning premeditation—are about to not only dispense but also form into a nice line ready for this person to snort Tony Montana-style, is that you might overhype this movie a smidge. Or maybe, you might create a sense of expectation that the movie is unlikely to match. Not because it’s bad, but because it offers something completely different than the picture you create in this person’s head might suggest.  

Which is why Longlegs, directed by Oz Perkins (of Gretel & Hansel and I’m the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House fame; also, son of Anthony Perkins, if that helps) has generated a lot of excitement, made bank at the box office and immediately spurred weird backlash from those who clearly went in with rather specific expectations. Not enough Cage. Too slow. Cage is not big enough. Nowhere near as scary as that Ari Aster film from way back when. Cage only goes half-hog, not whole hog. And they sure as hell paid for the whole hog… only to emerge underhogged.

However, if you leave all this baggage at the door and just walk in with your mind a blank slate for the filmmaker to impose himself onto, what you will see is a brooding, tonally oppressive dark fairy tale that imagines what The Silence of the Lambs would have looked like if it had been written by the Grimm brothers and if the story took a sharp left turn halfway through and imagined that right underneath the world the characters inhabited—a world where some kind of a maniac takes pleasure from forcing people to violently murder and dismember their entire families before (sorry, Chuck, I’m borrowing your line, but plagiarism is the highest form of flattery so chin up) painting the walls with their brains—hides a whole different ballgame of tonal dread recursively folding back upon the central character in hopes she loses her marbles and enters the void of madness.

That’s more or less where you are with Longlegs, a movie sold on that Cage-goes-wild meme, because good folks at Neon know it will sell tickets. Good on them, because this movie needs butts in seats, but maybe it would be even more fun if all those peeps expecting jeepers-knows-what were all informed the movie ain’t what they think it is only three seconds before all exits are locked by the cinema staff who cackle maniacally as they padlock the doors. Give them five minutes to pipe down and roll the movie where, after a brief prelude where Cage does indeed go big for exactly half a second and somehow makes you wonder if he has been specifically asked to look like Randy “The Ram” Robinson from The Wrestler, we meet face to face with Maika Monroe (It Follows, The Guest and more recently Watcher, a movie which worked almost exclusively thanks to her presence) who plays a Clarice Starling-type: a driven FBI agent straight out of the academy, Lee Harker her name, who is thrown in at the deep end of the pool when a simple “canvas the area and ask neighbours if they heard or saw anything strange” turns into a gory bloodbath and ends with her taking on what her boss (Blair Underwood) calls the Longlegs case. You know, like the title. From there, Harker begins plumbing the depths of a case where whole families go extinct on short notice and conveniently around specific dates, coded letters turn up at people’s doorsteps signed only as “Longlegs” and where a bunch of life-size dolls are found buried or lying about in various states of disrepair all over town.  

But that’s not even the half of it. Because Harker, as she becomes progressively consumed by the case and effectively her perception of the world becomes inadvertently altered by a nascent of dreadful visions which blur the line between nightmares and reality, finds herself in a universe of supernatural horror, where serial killers may not be simplistic agents of chaos driven by their unresolved mommy issues or whatever the hell else propels them to stalk and violently dismember unsuspecting members of the public, but instead may be puppets controlled by ancient evil lurking in shadows. Behind closed doors. Beneath the obsidian darkness of a doll’s eye.  

Thus, Longlegs isn’t scary. It’s terrifying. It’s not jumpy, not really. Though, it does have its few moments that are sure to be remembered, one of which may or may not involve Cage going big and ruining a perfectly good-looking table. It’s dreadful. Good-dreadful. Dreadful the way a dark fairy tale can be dreadful. Tonally constricting, asphyxiating horror capable of sucking the oxygen out of the room and looking at you with an ever so noticeable smirk as you writhe on the floor gasping for air, hoping for this madness to come to its conclusion. In many ways, Oz Perkins shows himself a cine-sadist who takes immense pleasure from keeping the viewer in a state of suspended animation as he deliberately dilates time and forces them to marinade in a pickling mixture of their innate fears, religious conditioning and good old-fashioned Hitchcockian suspense.  

Without a shadow of a doubt, Perkins reaches for the stars here with his determination to upset the viewer combined with almost complete disregard for following the basic traditions of the genre. Resolutions are sparse in here and when they make landfall, they betray their Polanskian provenance. In short, Longlegs is not meant to entertain the Film Twitter pleb thirsty for Cage rage and shock-jock memery, but rather to tickle those who revel in tonal phantasmagoria and eagerly await that sleepless fortnight which is sure to follow once you make sense of the narrative and let its terror infest your soul.  

Longlegs is not scary, but terrifying. Not shocking but upsetting. Not slow but deliberately oppressive. A movie whose terror finds its niche in the twilight zone between Demme and Del Toro, between Polanski and Lovecraft. Sticky and disconcerting.  

I suppose what I’m trying to articulate is that Longlegs is a movie you need to see, even if I have to lie to you about what’s in it. Sure, come thinking what you want. That Cage goes big in it. That it’s kind of like an Ari Aster movie. That it’s like The Silence of the Lambs or Zodiac, but more decisively in the horror space. There are nuggets of truth in all those statements, but none of them betray what Longlegs achieves, which is a horror of the variety you need to lean into in order to feel it.  

And when you do, what you shall feel is quite simply unmatched. But this is where the danger is: if you lean back instead of in, Longlegs will lose its magical powers and you shall emerge bored, discontented, cheated, as Oz Perkins’s cinematic stranglehold is only effective at short distances.  

So, give the movie and yourself a chance. Lean in. And let the terror wash over you.