I’ve seen Longlegs twice now. Our relationship with art is an ever-evolving thing, so we can revisit this in a few years, but for now, at least, my feeling about the movie is that some of it is quite good and some of it, eh, maybe not so much.
Still, I’m grateful for any picture that provides us with so much to think about and discuss.
So I’m going to semi-haphazardly ramble about the film for a couple of thousand words, mostly as part of my effort to understand what writer/director Osgood Perkins was trying to achieve, and how audiences have consumed and reacted to the picture.
I’m also going to spoil every single aspect of this movie. I’m also going to spoil some older movies, including Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, David Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac, and William Brent Bell’s The Boy. You’ve been warned.
Longlegs can be considered and evaluated by four separate criteria: as a narrative, as an exploration of a theme, as a mood piece, and a puzzle.
Let’s go one by one.
LONGLEGS AS A NARRATIVE
As a narrative, Longlegs biffs it.
One complaint about the movie that I’ve been hearing a lot is that it doesn’t answer enough of its mysteries. The counter-argument inevitably becomes that this criticism fails to properly engage with the film; it demands that the storyteller lay everything out plainly for the audience, and doesn’t allow for ambiguity or interpretation.
Thing is, whether they’re conscious of it or not, I believe people who feel like Longlegs doesn’t connect enough dots aren’t really reacting to the way the movie doesn’t explain every detail of every facet of the plot; what they’re actually reacting to is a lack of narrative meaning as expressed via the characters and their actions.
Put another way: the protagonist’s emotional journey is thin.
Superficially, as many have pointed out, Longlegs borrows more than a little bit from Silence of the Lambs and two of its best descendants, Se7en and Zodiac. But the primary characters of those stories are far more filled out than Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), the young FBI agent at the center of Longlegs.
In Silence of the Lambs, Clarice (Jodie Foster) is fighting not only against a serial killer (or really two serial killers, if you count Hannibal Lecter), but also systemic misogyny and her personal demons (i.e., the traumatic incident from which the story takes its title). When she saves the kidnapped young woman at the end, she has disproven the sexists who believed female FBI agents to be inferior and quelled her guilt from being unable to save the lambs on her uncle’s farm.
In Se7en, Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is on the cusp of retirement, sickened by just how far into cruelty the world around him has sunk. His new partner, David Mills (Brad Pitt), is a young go-getter whose faith in humanity has not yet been torn apart. The events of the movie absolutely destroy Mills, and convince Somerset that the world is “worth fighting for.” They basically arc in different directions, leaving the viewer to ponder their own stance on the matter.
In Zodiac, every detective, professional or otherwise, becomes obsessed with the case to a life-ruining degree. Despite this, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) will not allow himself to rest until he is certain (or at least reasonably certain, I guess) that he has uncovered the killer’s identity.
Compare these examples to Longlegs.
Lee does not appear to the victim of rampant bigotry: there’s a slight insinuation that her first partner may have lecherous intentions, but that guy gets killed immediately, and the subject never comes up again (unless you count the two seconds when her boss’ daughter asks her if it’s scary being a “lady FBI agent,” and she says it is).
Nor is Lee haunted by anything: she has repressed memories, but how that has affected her life is never made clear.
She seems to be on the spectrum, but maybe she’s just emotionally chilly and socially awkward? After the big reveal - that her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), became Longlegs’ accomplice to save Lee’s life, and that Longlegs has been living in Ruth’s basement - there’s a scene where she’s driving in Longlegs’ car and she lets out a scream, which is the most emoting she ever does. I think the idea is that the recovered memory has opened her up emotionally in some way… but, then, we never got to see what effect being emotionally distant was having on her life (which also robs the evil-was-right-under-your-nose metaphor of Longlegs living with her mother of its potency).
There’s a line of dialogue that suggests that Ruth still sees Lee as a child, but that also has no dramatized effect; this is not, for example, Chris Columbus’ Only the Lonely, where a mother’s refusal to let go of her adult child is actively preventing him from finding happiness. In fact, Lee always calls Ruth, and Ruth never calls Lee; heck, Ruth never even recognizes her only child’s voice when she calls. Ruth doesn’t exactly keep Lee on a short leash.
In a recent interview, Perkins said of the story:
“The real issue in the movie is a mother’s decision to create the ultimate protective womb around her kid. She goes to pretty grisly lengths to maintain it. The question becomes, is it wrong to do everything you can to protect your own child?”
That is an interesting question! And I acknowledge that, for Perkins, it’s coming from a very personal place:
“That comes down to my growing up with a famous father [Psycho star Anthony Perkins] who is a closeted gay man. And that fact didn’t fit the narrative of my family…. My mom became sort of part of the cover…it’s a strange thing to live in a cover.”
Unfortunately, that issue is not actually addressed in the movie.
Sure, Ruth had to do terrible things to protect Lee… but how did that impact Lee? How did it impact Ruth, for that matter? Not all that much, according to Witt:
“I could tell right away that [Ruth] had some trauma before meeting Longlegs, and that was a lot of what I journaled on and worked on prior to filming the movie. [Perkins] was completely in agreement with that, and that was also what he felt from her. I believe she would have probably experienced some debilitating mental illness one way or the other, anyhow, but obviously not to the extent that happened.”
So… were the sole consequences that Ruth became a hoarder and Longlegs surreptitiously moved into her basement1?
Mentioning a profound ethical question is not the same thing as wrestling with a profound ethical question. And Longlegs only ever mentions the moral quandary Perkins seems to believe is at the heart of his story.
Ultimately, Lee’s arc is purely superficial: at the beginning of the story, she does not believe her mom is a murderer, and at the end, she shoots her mom in the head. Under different narrative circumstances, this might been a symbol of a child finally cutting free from an abusive parent or something like that… but Ruth is never shown to be abusive, and there’s no sense that she’s a domineering figure in her daughter’s life.
Traditionally, audiences find meaning in the emotional and psychological journey of the protagonist; it’s what clues you into what the story is really “about.” Since Lee’s travails are so surface-level, the story never feels like it’s about anything.
And that’s why people feel unsatisfied by Longlegs. It’s not because no one ever explains exactly what the steel balls the killer places inside his doll’s heads are; it’s because Lee is not a very strong character.
LONGLEGS AS AN EXPLORATION OF A THEME
Of course, Longlegs is under no obligation to be a traditional narrative. In fact, one of the greatest horror films ever made - and one that’s been in the press a lot recently, given the recent passing of the great Shelley Duvall - is The Shining, which also eschews many “rules” of traditional narrative.
Except The Shining’s themes of repression and the inescapability of the self are clear and consistent in every character, plot point, and symbolic image: the hotel manager omits a key truth about the job until Jack (Jack Nicholson) has all but accepted; Jack is an alcoholic who has promised his wife, Wendy (Duvall), to stop drinking and bury his abusive temper; Jack and Wendy’s son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), keep his psychic abilities a secret from his parents; it’s implied that at the end that Jack has somehow been a part of the hotel all along; there’s a forbidden room, an elevator overflowing with blood, and a maze, the escape from which requires the triumph of intellect over emotion.
Longlegs has a LOT of themes in that it has a lot of recurring motifs (more on that momentarily). But there’s no discernible organizing principle connecting those motifs; there’s no clear thematic through-line.
LONGLEGS AS A MOOD PIECE
Purely as a mood piece, Longlegs is largely successful, depending on your tolerance for what Nicolas Cage is doing as the title character.
Perkins’ single greatest strength as a director may be the way he understands how audiences have been conditioned by years of cinematic storytelling, which allows him to frequently build tension by playing with that conditioning.
For example, there are multiple shots where Perkins frames Lee in a such a way that there is an almost egregious level of space around her - space that is often filled by a door or a window or some other potential entranceway.
Usually, when we see these kinds of shots in horror flicks, it’s because there’s about to be a scare: you leave all that negative space in the frame because something scary is about to fill it.
There’s even a moment in Alien where the camera subtly re-frames Harry Dean Stanton, mid-shot, from the center to the side to make space.
So every time we see one of these shots in Longlegs, it has the Pavlovian effect of making us tense up in anticipation of something shocking… and then that thing never arrives.
Until it does, of course: late in the movie, another FBI agent (Michelle Choi-Lee) is sitting in her car when Ruth steps into view behind her brandishing a rifle. And in contrast to so many other jump scares in cinema, it’s deeply effective, because all the jump scares fake-outs have gotten our dumb brains to assume there isn’t about to be an authentic jump scare.
These are brilliant choices that I think keep the audience wound-up the whole way through, and are at least part of why some people find the movie so scary.
The sound design in this film is also excellent. See this movie in a theater with a really good sound system, and all the creepy little noises Lee hears in the distance at various points in the movie sound as though they’re coming from behind you, or, worse, next to you. More than once, it took me a second to realize I was hearing the movie, not someone a few seats over. That’s off-putting (which I intend as a compliment).
But then there’s the Nicolas Cage of it all.
I know that Cage’s characteristically over-the-top performance really works for some people; I envy them. I found it comedic. Ditto his appearance, which feels more like South Park’s interpretation of Michael Jackson than Buffalo Bill.
I dunno. Maybe if I had no idea who Nicolas Cage was, or had never seen Nicolas Cage do anything like this before, I’d have felt awed. But it’s. Y’know. It’s Nicolas freakin’ Cage. His entire brand is being aggressively weird.
LONGLEGS AS A PUZZLE
If you’re the kind of person who loves obsessively going through clues to mysteries that likely have no actual answer2, Longlegs is the movie you’ve been waiting for. There is a truly Lost-level amount of stuff going on in this movie that may or may not be genuinely significant. Here are some that I noticed:
When Lee is explaining Longlegs’ algorithm to her boss (Blair Underwood), she points out that the killings ultimately form the shape of an inverted triangle. Situated prominently behind her as she explains this is a large triangle. The graph she uses to illustrate the triangle for her boss is also spread out on his desk, right next to his ashtray, in which a trio of used cigarettes form a triangle. Chris Lambert notes that there’s an inverted triangle in the test they give her to see if she’s a psychic. I would wager the shape pops up in other places I didn’t notice as well.
The Blair Underwood character’s young daughter tells Lee that her father insists on holding onto her baby stuff so she doesn’t grow up too fast - “But I’m going to grow up anyway.” The little girl’s father later tries to kill her. Ruth not only hoards everything from Lee’s childhood (including her baby teeth), but she tells Lee that Lee grew up because she was “allowed” to grow up as a result of Ruth’s sacrifice. This is really the only aspect of the movie that addresses that whole issue of what a parent will do to protect their child and/or hold on too tightly to their child.
The victims are always only-child families in which the kid is invariably a girl, and the perpetrator is always the father. Lee’s father, however, is conspicuously never even mentioned; the closet she comes, Lambert notes, is when she says “Father” as part of her word association with the inverted triangle in the psychic test.
Numerologists will surely enjoy dissecting the importance of the numbers 9 and 14. I hope they have fun with that.
The movie opens with a quote from T. Rex’s biggest hit, “Get It On,” which also plays over the closing credits. Meanwhile, Longlegs decorates his living space with a poster of T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, and his work space with a poster of Lou Reed. Longlegs also sings at one point, and there are amps and guitar cases visible in his apartment. On top of which, he is explicitly compared to Charles Manson at one point. The implication is that he’s a failed rock musician who learned about Satanism while operating in that world. Perkins has already pretty much confirmed this: “The movie is like, ‘He’s just a dude who fell in with the wrong crowd. The devil.’ He was just riffing on his guitar one day and the devil starts coming through the headphones.” Why Perkins used Bolan and Reed, neither of whom is closely associated with the occult the way certain other rock stars are, I could not tell you.
Longlegs repeatedly makes reference to “the man downstairs” and “Mr. Downstairs,” which most people (myself included) have interpreted as euphemisms for Satan. But Longlegs is, himself, literally the man downstairs.
The trailer actually highlights this far more explicitly than the movie does, but there are matching shots of Longlegs and Lee freaking out in their respective cars.
I humbly admit that I don’t really know how to end this piece. Thus, I leave you with this incredible exchange from the world of Reddit:
Hail Satan.
That twist has been done before, by the way, and in a manner I find far creepier: The Boy appears to be a possessed doll movie, until the end, when we learn there’s a lunatic living in the walls, and that he was the one making the doll seem to be possessed. It’s unsettling because it means the protagonist has been living in a house with a grown man for however long and never knew it (which means she also has no idea what kinds of private moments were not private at all). Longlegs, again, fails to dramatize the idea of the killer living with Ruth, so it’s spooky, but nearly so spooky as it might have been.
Directly from Perkins’ mouth: “I don’t give a fuck about triangles and numbers and dates and clues and shit.”