Longlegs

If you’ve heard of Longlegs, it’s probably due to the amazing marketing campaign that Neon put together for the movie. That campaign made it a financial success, but it also led to a sharp divide among audiences, with many people walking away disappointed. The problem with constructing a mystery box is that people will put whatever they want inside that box, and if what you actually deliver doesn’t measure up, they’re going to be far more frustrated than if you never showed them the box in the first place. In this case, a marketing campaign that says (in so many words) that this is the scariest horror movie you’ve ever seen is going to make people imagine their own personal Ultimate Horror Movie, an expectation that it’s very unlikely any real movie can live up to.

I only watched Longlegs recently, after all the hype had died down. (I tried to see it in cinemas the day it came out, but a migraine forced me to leave the cinema after less than fifteen minutes). My reaction is neither particularly positive nor negative. The movie looks and sounds amazing, but it has an underbaked screenplay that clearly needed another revision or two to tighten it up. Like a satanic metal orb placed in the head of a life-sized doll, Longlegs is mysterious, sinister, and hollow.

The story: it’s the 90s, and a serial killer named Longlegs is wiping out families who have daughters whose birthdays fall on certain days of the month. The complicating factor is that he does this without ever coming near the families themselves, apparently compelling the fathers somehow to carry out the deed for him. If it wasn’t for a series of coded messages left at the crime scenes, no one would ever know they weren’t unconnected murder-suicides. Our protagonist is Lee Harker, a new FBI agent who gets assigned to the case after making a seemingly-random breakthrough while knocking on doors looking for witnesses. Soon the killer is directly targeting Lee with threatening letters and other manifestations, prompting both her and her FBI superiors to ask: how does Longlegs know who she is, and why is he so interested in her?

I want to talk about this movie’s vibes up front, because they’re undoubtedly the best part of the package. Constructed mostly out of wide shots combined with close-ups of the actors’ faces, the movie is simultaneously distant and claustrophobic, creating the impression that there’s always something lurking off-screen, waiting to pounce. Great use is made of eyelines; over and over again Lee or someone else will slowly peer out of the frame, the darting of their eyes making the viewer wonder if they’ve spotted something horrible that the camera has yet to show us.

Combined with a powerful and eerie score, this all creates an incredible atmosphere of dread, which is especially impressive when you consider that there are only a few scenes in the movie where Lee or the rest of the cast are actually in any kind of danger. Very quickly, the tension ramps up to the point that I half expected someone or something to leap out of the side of the frame at any moment. On top of this, the movie makes frequent uses of flashbacks and cuts to investigative materials like crime scene photos and stylised depictions of the coded letters, which means that even when absolutely nothing frightening is happening, you’re still not safe from being suddenly confronted by something scary.

Unfortunately, those confrontations are often accompanied by SUDDEN REALLY LOUD MUSIC, because horror movies just can’t fucking help themselves. There are actually no diagetic jump scares in the movie—no hissing cats, no people leaping out of closets or shadowy doorways, no ghosts springing into frame—but there are multiple instances where sudden cuts, including to title cards, act as jump scares due to the aformentioned LOUD MUSIC THAT SUDDENLY COMES OUT OF NOWHERE. I’ve talked before about how much I hate jump scares, but I especially hate them when they’re not even taking place within the fiction of the movie. There is one that gets a pass since it plays over Lee suddenly being confronted with a traumatic repressed memory and the sound is part of the effect used to convey that that’s happening, but there’s no excuse for chapter titles to have jump scare music.

Nicholas Cage plays the titular Longlegs, something you could easily have missed since the marketing campaign deliberately kept his appearance a secret. The actual movie handles this in kind of a baffling way. The first few times you see him, his face is clearly being obscured; you only get a good look at the bottom half, and the few times you see his entire face it’s in a split-second glimpse. But then, very quickly, the movie dispenses with this and just gives you long, unobstructed views of what he looks like. I thought this was a bad idea, especially considering there’s a late-movie scene with a VHS recording of Longlegs on a low-definition TV that would have been perfect for a face reveal.

Maybe the filmmakers just wanted to get maximum Nic Cage time for their money. I do not share the internet’s strange meme-obsession with Cage—he’s fun to watch in clip compilations, but I find his antics are usually a hindrance to an actual movie—but here, I thought he was perfectly cast. The weird falsetto accent he speaks in could have been unintentionally funny, but it instead comes across as genuinely creepy. The same goes for the moments where he bursts into song or does the Nic Cage screeching thing. It probably helps that he’s under heavy makeup and prosthetics, which makes him basically unrecognisable.

The actual character of Longlegs is another matter entirely, and this is where my criticisms start coming in. He’s a very compelling antagonist for the movie’s first two thirds or so. Then you find out what his deal is… or rather, you find out that he doesn’t really have a deal beyond what the opening minutes of the movie tell you. It’s not quite as simple as “he’s crazy” or “he kills people because he’s evil and he enjoys it”, but it’s also not much deeper than that. You end up with this odd situation where Longlegs’ presence and influence are far more compelling than the actual character himself, which was possibly intentional given what that influence is rooted in, but the practical effect of it is that it makes the last third or so of the movie fizzle out.

Something broadly similar happens with the investigation and what it reveals about Longlegs’ methods. I’m going to put a spoiler section at the end of the review in order to go into my thoughts more deeply, but the spoiler-free version is that how he’s killing these families ends up being simultaneously overly complicated and too simplistic. There are a lot of aspects to it, which gives the impression that Lee’s investigation is slowly uncovering this complex web of occult mystery, but once the movie has to lay out for the audience how and why all of this is happening, it turns out to be kind of anticlimactic. It doesn’t help that some of the elements of Longlegs’ MO seem to be purely for narrative convenience, like the birthday thing, which as far as I can tell is only in the movie to facilitate a bit of numerology that Lee uses to track down a clue.

(Why is Longlegs leaving these letters and making this breadcrumb trail in the first place? I dunno, maybe because he’s crazy and evil. Or probably just because if he didn’t, it would be impossible for Lee to catch him and then the story wouldn’t function).

This might have all worked better if the movie was more willing to leave things ambiguous. In some respects, it absolutely is: there are several key scenes, including the movie’s ending, which are left entirely up to the viewer to interpret, with no real guidance from the movie. But in other respects the movie seems to distrust the audience’s ability to put two and two together, hammering home information that was already conveyed perfectly well via dialogue and visuals. The worst of this comes near the end, where a flashback/voice-over lays out what Longlegs’ deal is and how Lee is connected to it all. I do think some sort of flashback was necessary to get across certain information, but the specific way the movie does it here, having someone just monologue about Longlegs’ methods and motivation, really lays bare how uninteresting those methods and motivations actually are (as well as strangely convoluted, which I’ll talk about more in the spoiler section).

Looking at the movie as a whole, I strongly suspect the screenplay was invented as it was being written, and then wasn’t revised to make later plot developments fit more smoothly into the overall story. Again, I’ll need spoilers to really explain this, but you can see it in the strange way the movie treats the supernatural.

The movie starts with Lee discovering that she might have psychic powers. Or at least, that’s what her FBI superiors think is happening, and it turns out they even have a method to test agents for abilities like that. The idea that she might be psychic is greeted by the two other FBI agent characters as being completely unremarkable, and in the same conversation where we find this out, Lee’s boss explains that Longlegs seems to be compelling the fathers of his victims to kill them without ever making direct contact with them, something which—particularly coming right after the “well I guess Lee might be psychic, that seems useful” conversation—I read as a direct implication that Longlegs is using supernatural methods. All of this together suggests that the movie is taking place in a setting where the FBI, or at least the part of the FBI investigating Longlegs, believes in the paranormal and is willing to take that into account when making decisions.

But then later, all of this goes out the window. Lee’s boss completely dismisses any suggestion that Longlegs might be influencing people’s minds from a distance—even though, again, he himself all but stated this to be the case earlier—and Lee being maybe-psychic never actually becomes relevant beyond the opening scene of the movie. It feels very much like the screenplay was being written at first with the idea that it’s taking place in this heightened, or maybe alternate, reality where this part of the FBI believes in psychic powers and the occult, but then halfway through whoever was writing it changed their mind, then didn’t bother to go back and rewrite the earlier bits.

Speaking of Lee, it’s apparent right from the first time we see her that there’s Something Up with her, in that she’s constantly nervous and on edge and she seems to completely lack social skills (to an extent that I feel would probably disqualify her from becoming an FBI agent in real life, but whatever, it’s fiction). We do get a potential explanation for why she’s like this, but the fact that she is like this has basically no impact on the movie. Most of the time, the other characters don’t even react to the fact that she’s acting strangely. You could edit Columbo into the movie in her place, and very little would change. Add to this the fact that Lee has pretty much no character development, and you end up with a protagonist who’s kind of empty.

Empty protagonist, empty villain, empty investigation… according to the Discourse I’ve seen, describing Longlegs as “style over substance” marks you out as a brainless rube who just didn’t understand the movie, but in that case I’m going to have to step forward and accept my rube card. The style on display here is great, but it needed a better story to be applied to.

Alright, spoiler space ahead.

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So, here’s the deal with Longlegs: he’s a devil worshipper who sacrifices families to satan (or at least, what he believes to be satan), which he does by making life-size dolls of girls whose birthdays fall on the 14th of any given month. The dolls have metal orbs in their heads, and the orbs contain Satan Essence or whatever. Once the doll is inside the house, the Satan Essence makes the father of the family go all Jack Torrence and kill everyone, and then himself. Longlegs needs an accomplice to get the dolls into the houses, since he looks like Jimmy Saville and Gary Glitter got combined in a teleporter accident and no parent in their right mind would let him near their daughter. His accomplice is Lee’s mother, Ruth Harker, who pretends to be a nun and says that the dolls are gifts that the family has won in a church contest. Ruth is doing this because Longlegs targeted Lee when Lee was a child, and he agreed to spare her in exchange for Ruth helping him.

Now, you may notice that this is kind of overly complicated. Like I said earlier, a lot of this shit doesn’t seem to have much of a point, like the birthday thing, or the fact that the father specifically is compelled to kill the family. You can come up with theories or thematic angles—it can’t be a coincidence that Lee didn’t have a father as a child—but given that the movie spends most of its runtime slowly revealing the nuts and bolts facts involved, it doesn’t particularly invite that kind of analysis. Discovering what’s going on with all of this is the entire story, and that’s a problem because once you’ve got it all laid out it, it’s both underwhelming and kind of nonsensical.

Just to be clear, when I say ‘nonsensical’ I don’t mean things like how Longlegs made the metal spheres even though he’s living in squalor in Ruth’s basement. Maybe satan gave them to him, whatever, they’re magic, doesn’t matter. I’ll even dismiss the issue I raised earlier of why he’s writing the letters that reveal his existence. Again, maybe satan told him to do that for some reason.

What I’m talking about is issues like why the dolls are even in the movie. If we’re introducing the idea that Longlegs needs a delivery vector for the Satan Essence, and he also needs a way to get that delivery vector into the victim’s houses, then why not have Ruth herself be the vector? That way the two questions of “how is he compelling the fathers to kill” and “how is he getting past the front door” would have the same answer, instead of having two different answers that are only tenuously connected. That’s assuming, of course, that the latter question even needed to be asked in the first place; when the movie first brought up the idea of an accomplice, I assumed the solution was going to be that Longlegs didn'’t actually have one, because his accomplice was Satan and he’s been using Satan Magic to get the dolls into the houses. (There are some earlier scenes that suggest he has no trouble sneaking into people’s homes, possibly via supernatural means).

I guess the root of my problem is that it seems like the twist about Ruth being Longlegs’ accomplice feels like the reason why Longlegs has an accomplice, rather than the other way around, as if whoever was writing the screenplay came up with the twist–possible fairly late in the development process–and then wrote backwards to justify its existence. It especially seems this way because the whole idea of an accomplice, while mentioned earlier, suddenly becomes really pressing and urgent right before we find out the accomplice is Ruth. I would have greatly preferred it if the idea of a mysterious person dressed as a nun being involved in the murders had been seeded earlier, instead of only coming up when the twist happens. That way my reaction would have been “Oh my God, the nun is the main character’s mom!” and not “Wait, why is there a nun involved all of a sudden?”