Longlegs is Spooky Fun
Longlegs has one of the best marketing campaigns a horror movie has had in recent memory. The trailers do a great job selling the atmosphere of it, what the movie feels like, though the movie isn’t quite the Silence of the Lambs or Seven like thriller the trailers are selling it as. It’s a different beast, something more abstract, surreal, and stranger.
I saw Longlegs alone in a theater at an early afternoon showing. Walking out of the theater into daylight and some time afterward, I was deeply unsettled for reasons difficult to articulate. I’ve seen movies that are more shocking, and gorier. Other movies have scared me more, and resonated better with me. But something about Longlegs, after my first viewing, felt cursed or haunted in a way few movies do. The cinematography, art direction, and sound design came together to create an atmosphere more than the sum of its parts, something engrossing, tense, and unnerving.
Longlegs plays with one of my favorite genres, lady FBI agent with a flashlight and a gun. Lee Harker, played wonderfully by Maika Monroe, of It Follows and The Guest fame, plays an antisocial FBI agent who may be somewhere on the spectrum tasked with solving a case decades in the making. A few dozen crime scenes of father’s brutally murdering their family then themselves are left with an accompanying coded letter with the phrase “LONGLEGS” at the bottom. Other than the letter, there’s no sign that these crimes are related at all or that there are any outside forces at play. Nevertheless, they are confident there’s a man named Longlegs responsible for these crimes. Agent Harker has an unusual sense of intuition, or is perhaps a little psychic as her supervisor suggests, and the FBI is desperate and willing to turn to let the reclusive new agent join the team.
This is the hook, but the movie itself plays with less detective work than you may imagine. It’s not very interested in the minutia of investigation and detective work, not that there aren’t some great scenes of that. When looking at her file Agent Carter, her supervisor played by Blair Underwood, asks her the last time she spoke with her mother, and its this relationship that Longlegs focuses on. Her mom seems to be an unwell hoarder and we wonder to what extent her behavior has influenced the person Harker has become.
Monroe plays Harker with restraint, awkward and uncomfortable, preferring not to get to know Carter’s family, and he jovially requiring her to meet them. Underwood is a welcome presence in the movie, Carter contrasting Harker’s reclusiveness, with a kind of passive charm that he plays well. When introduced, he’d mostly like to speak about his basketball team. Their scenes together are well done and compelling.
Most things about the film are well done and compelling. The imagery director Osgood Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi accomplish is subtle and arresting. The imagery combined with the score by Elvis Perkins, the directors brother, creates an audiovisual feast. The score is unsettling and haunting, suiting the images so well that we don’t actively think of the score- of course this is what these shots sound like, what other sound could it possibly conjure? The sound design itself is well done and immersive, though I could see some rejecting the louder moments as too jump scary. Not to mention Nicholas Cage, who understands exactly what movie he’s in, and delivers exactly what it needs him to do.
The character dynamics are compelling, the cast performs well, it is a very involving watch, not one to put on in the background. The movie absolutely nails the vibe it is aspiring for, and has an oppressive atmosphere many horror/thriller fans will delight in. If you are the type of person to enjoy a vibe oriented movie, where the details can fade away if the scene feels right emotionally, you will likely find a lot to enjoy here.
Those more detail oriented, who would prefer to consider holes in the story than what the film was working to suggest, could be disappointed by it as a whole. It moves into a direction I wasn’t anticipating, and was a little taken aback with my first viewing. Thinking of it in retrospect, I expect it will work better when rewatching, knowing where the movie is going and what it is aiming for, though others may not be so generous, and I wouldn’t fault them for it.
