Major spoilers ahead for Longlegs. You’ve been warned.
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It’s been a long while since Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Se7en (1995) pretty much revolutionized the serial killer/crime thriller/police procedural genre. Both films told fascinating stories and showed just how exceptional a movie can be when all the many aspects of filmmaking come together in just the right way. Both films also created terrifying and memorable villains in Jame Gumb and John Doe.
And though there have been myriad rip-offs in the decades since, none have come close to recreating them. But then Neon released the trailer for Longlegs, one of the best put-together trailers ever made. Scary and gritty, it promised something akin to those amazing flicks. But does it deliver? That’s the real question.
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Longlegs begins with a prologue set in Oregon during the winter, sometime in the 70’s. The screen even starts out in the old 1.33:1 aspect ratio to help us feel that 70s vibe. A young girl (Lauren Acala) drawing up in her room hears a noise and goes outside with her trusty Polaroid camera. She sees a strange car parked nearby – but before she can approach it, she hears a voice behind her. She turns to see a weird, pale guy whose face we can’t quite see. He calls her the “almost birthday girl.” She asks who he is, and he just says he wore his “longlegs” that day.
Then the story begins in earnest, dividing itself into parts. Part One is called “His Letters.” It’s now the 90s, and at an FBI field office in Oregon, a bunch of rookie agents sit in a meeting, including Lee Harker (Maika Monroe). They’re looking for a murder suspect, and the agents get assigned to canvassing neighborhoods.
When Lee and her partner (Dakota Daulby) arrive at their area, Lee scans the block and on a hunch, points out one of the houses. Her partner goes up to the front door – and gets shot right in the head. A scared Lee goes in gun drawn and finds the perpetrator just sitting on the bed. He gives up quietly and without a fight.
Afterward, Lee meets with her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood). He commends her on her work and talks about Lee possibly being psychic, or at least highly intuitive. Lee doesn’t say much but does agree that she has an ability of some kind. He tasks her with looking into another case where several families have been killed in the same way. All of them were committed by the father, who then killed himself. And Zodiac-type coded letters were found at each scene, signed by someone called “Longlegs.”
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Lee drives Carter home and he invites her in. Being borderline anti-social, Lee resists at first but then agrees. She meets Carter’s wife, Anna (Carmel Amit), and daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders). Ruby takes an instant liking to Lee and invites her to her room. She asks Lee if she always wanted to be an agent, and Lee admits that she wanted to be an actor. Ruby then asks the important question, as to whether it’s scary being a “lady FBI agent.” And Lee just answers gently, simply and succinctly, “Yeah.” Ruby then invites Lee over for her upcoming birthday.
Later that night at her cabin, Lee examines the evidence from the cold cases. She also calls her mother, Ruth (the awesome Alicia Witt). It’s clear from the way they speak to each other that their relationship isn’t exactly close. Then someone pounds on Lee’s door, but no one’s there. Lee looks out the window and sees a figure in the woods. But when she goes outside to check it out, she can’t find anything. Then she turns around to see the figure inside the cabin. By the time she gets back inside, they’re gone. But there’s an envelope addressed to her with the instruction not to open it before January 14th.
Part Two is titled “All of Your Things.” Lee carefully opens the letter with gloves on. Inside is a 9th Birthday card written in the same code as the other letters. Lee manages to decipher a passage from the Bible, from the Book of Revelation. The passage describes the antichrist, the beast with seven heads, ten horns and ten crowns.
Later, Carter brings Lee to another Longlegs crime scene. They look at the gruesome state of the family’s bodies, the father once again being the killer. Back at the office, Lee tells Carter what she figured out, showing him an algorithm that Longlegs uses to commit the murders. Each murder took place six days before the daughter’s birthday, which were all on the 14th of the month. Lee surmises that Longlegs must have at least one accomplice.
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Meanwhile, Longlegs is out shopping for supplies at a hardware store. We still don’t get to see his entire face, but we do get to see his long, white hair and bleached white skin. He acts all weird to the kid at the counter, and the stonefaced kid just shouts for her dad to come deal with “the creepy guy” who’s back again. Longlegs then goes back to his lair, ranting and singing.
Lee and Carter check out the home of another family of victims, the Cameras. They check out the house and the barn, where the murders took place. Under a crucifix nailed to the floorboards, they find a large doll. The doll looks like daughter Carrie Anne, who actually survived the attack because she wasn’t home when the murders happened.
They take the doll to the medical examiner, who praises the meticulous work of the dollmaker. It’s beautifully made and even has a “brain,” a metal ball inside the head. The doctor puts a microphone to it and strangely, it makes noise – noise that causes Lee to have sudden, weird visions. The doctor also says that the doll “whispered” his ex-wife’s name. Creepy.
Lee goes to visit Carrie Anne (a short but terrific performance by Kiernan Shipka), who’s been in a psychiatric facility for almost 20 years. She’d been pretty much catatonic until recently, when she got a visitor. Then suddenly she snapped out of it and started talking. When Lee looks at the visitor log, it’s her own name on the list – but clearly written in Longlegs’ handwriting. When Lee talks to Carrie Anne, she recounts in strange, affected language her vision of her father killing a priest, then her mother. But Carrie Anne says she would do whatever Longlegs told her to – even killing Lee.
Carter tells Lee he knows that she encountered Longlegs when she was younger – something that Lee herself has forgotten. So she goes to visit her mother, who lives like a recluse, her house a hoarder’s den. When she speaks, it’s clear that Ruth isn’t quite in her right mind. She asks Lee if she says her prayers, but Lee says no, “Never once,” because prayers scare her.
Lee offers to make Ruth something to eat. While in the kitchen, she finds it odd that the door to the basement is locked. Then she finds some old Polaroids that she took – including some of the stranger who came to their house when she was younger. Yep, you guessed it – the girl in the very beginning is Lee, and the pictures she took are of Longlegs. A shocked Lee takes the photos to Carter, and with them the FBI manages to capture Longlegs, whose real name is Dale Ferdinand Cobble. Watching the video feed from the interrogation room, Lee’s stunned as he addresses her through the camera, singing “Happy Birthday.”
Lee then decides to go see him herself, and we finally get to see his whole face, a creepy, clown-like visage that’s all bleached. Lee asks who else is working with him, but all he does is ramble about “the man downstairs,” whom he serves. Then he tells her to talk to her mother to get her answers. And after wishing her a happy birthday, Longlegs bashes his face on the table, over and over, until he’s dead.
Carter yells at Lee for going in there, saying they’ll never know who else was helping him now. And they can’t get any more information from Carrie Anne, because she just jumped off the roof of the hospital. Lee goes back to her mother’s with another agent (Michelle Choi-Lee), the plan being to bring her in for questioning. Lee looks around inside, but Ruth doesn’t seem to be around.
Finally, Lee spots something out the window – it’s her mother, dressed up like a nun. Ruth sneaks up on the car and blows the poor agent’s head off with a shotgun. Lee runs outside to find Ruth with a doll, just like the one Carrie Anne had – but this one looks just like Lee. Ruth says she’s finally free of Longlegs’ control and shoots the head off the doll. The metal ball inside the doll’s head shatters, strange black smoke leaking out. And as if it’s some kind of switch, Lee collapses, unconscious.
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The last part is titled “Birthday Girls.” We hear Ruth’s voice telling a story. Once upon a time, when Longlegs first came to them, she pleaded with him to spare Lee. In exchange, Ruth became Longlegs’ accomplice. He would build the dolls and she would deliver them. Ruth would just tell the family that the doll was a gift from the local church. Dressed up as a nun, no one ever expected anything bad to happen and would let her in.
Turns out the magic metal balls inside the dolls contained some kind of demonic essence that would influence the family’s behavior. And that locked basement in the Harkers’ house? That’s where Longlegs was living. And the doll he made of Lee influenced her, giving her that psychic ability. Ruth ends the story by saying that everything she did was to protect Lee, to save her from going to Hell.
Lee then wakes up in her old room, her mom gone. She hears the phone ringing and answers it – a voice tells her she’s missing Ruby’s birthday party. Lee takes her mom’s old car and rushes to Carter’s house – but she’s too late, Ruth is already there. Lee tries to talk to Carter, but he and Anna are already fully under the doll’s spell. And all Ruby can do is hug the doll with the same vacant look.
Ruth suggests they get the cake, so Carter and Anna go to the kitchen. We hear sounds of a struggle, and we know that Carter’s murdering his wife. Lee tries to get Ruth to stop the whole thing, but she won’t. She’s about to attack Ruby when Lee shoots her right in the head. Then Lee then tries to shoot the doll’s head – but she’s out of ammo. So she takes Ruby and leaves.
The last shot is of Longlegs from the interrogation room. Simultaneously merry and frightening, he laughs maniacally and says, “Hail Satan.” Then he blows a kiss.
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I’ve been so looking forward to Longlegs, ever since I saw that awesome trailer. I’ve really been longing for a terrifically scary crime thriller. Some have come close to the level of Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, like Zodiac (2007) and Prisoners (2013). And it’s clear that Longlegs takes some hints from each of these flicks, especially in its visual style. Osgood Perkins and his DP, Andres Arochi, did an incredible job of plunging us into the look and feel of both the 70s and the 90s. There’s a stark, dreary, monochromatic appearance to everything that reflects the bleakness of the story.
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The other aspect that really shines is Maika Monroe’s performance. She makes Lee a waypoint in such a strange story, providing steadiness even though it’s clear that Lee has a lot of issues. Her blunt, taciturn nature and her inner fear (she nearly hyperventilates whenever she has to pull her weapon) make her feel more real than the usual Hollywood, gung-ho, macho approach in portraying law enforcement. Alicia Witt also turns in a mesmerizing portrayal of Lee’s mother, crazy and lucid all at the same time, making for a character who’s just as scary as Longlegs.
And of course, there’s Nicolas Cage, whose take on Longlegs is surprisingly humorous. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is something I’m still trying to figure out. The decision to hide his face for most of his screen time was definitely a smart one, as one’s mental picture of a monster is almost always worse than the real thing. It’s so true in this case that, once you see Longlegs’ full appearance, you kinda go, “Oh…is that it?”
As for his behavior, it goes back and forth between that of a Pennywise-type party clown and a homicidal elf. Again, whether that’s good or bad is something I think I may need a few more viewings to decide. My initial feeling is that it’s weird and creepy, but maybe not quite sinister enough to take seriously. And then, bang (or more like bang-bang-bang), he’s dead, before we really get to know anything about him. It feels like a letdown.
Then there’s the story – Longlegs feels like it comes from the same place as one of Osgood Perkins’ other films, I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House (2016), which is more of a ghost story-poem set to film instead of the written word. It’s very much an art piece, like a painting that moves and talks. Sounds pretentious, and yeah, it kinda is.
Even though it has the basic structure of the crime thriller/procedural drama, Longlegs often strays from that path to venture into the supernatural and the demonic. But it’s like a speech that digresses from the main topic into other things that aren’t related. The angles about the dolls being some Annabelle-ish demonic device and Longlegs being a servant of Satan are only vaguely touched upon. Nothing is ever explained with any real clarity. This isn’t to say that the audience needs to be spoon-fed info dumps. But there’s a murkiness to the storytelling in Longlegs that just left me confused by the end.
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Religion, however (or the lack of it), is all over the place, swinging a pretty heavy sledgehammer. Though I’m not exactly sure what Perkins is trying to say about it. Except maybe that either way, whether you have religion or not, life is scary. And unfortunately, all of this has the overall effect of dragging the film down.
Longlegs nails the look, has some genuinely good, shocking moments, and an overall eerie vibe. But it’s also unfocused, a little pretentious and unfortunately doesn’t deliver the full ride that the trailer promises. It is a good effort and a worthwhile watch – but if you want the whole package, you’re better off just watching Silence of the Lambs or Se7en.
Written and Directed by: Osgood Perkins
Release date: July 12, 2024
Rating: R
Run time: 1hr, 41min
Distributor: Neon
https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/maxxxine-spoiler-review-mia-goth-ti-west/
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