An Ambitious, Bombastic & Limitless Exploration Of Terror
“I saw a beast rise out of the sea with seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns, he wore ten crowns, and on each head was written a blasphemous name.”
By the time FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) quietly utters these words aloud to her superior agent Carter (Blair Underwood), they’ve caught their killer. Longlegs (Nicholas Cage) is under the floor, happily waiting in an interrogation room for Lee. Unfortunately, the twilight of a nightmare is closing in on Lee and Carter’s investigation, the finale which unbeknown to them has been years in the making.
Set in mid-90s Oregon, newly recruited Lee Harker’s first assigned case is that of an anonymous killer who goes by the name “Longlegs” who’s been killing various families since the mid-70s. All the families are devout Catholics, they all have a daughter whose birthday is on the 14th, and the murders are all carried out by the father in a murder-suicide after which a note from Longlegs is left at the scene. The notes are written in a satanic font which Lee spends hours translating through the night.
Lee is a very quiet, shy, and observant young woman living her life in constant dread and silent fright, waiting for the horrible inevitable to happen, not knowing what that is. Just a nasty gut feeling inside her that slowly proves itself to be correct. She feels strongly that she has to be doing her job as barbaric as it is. She breathes heavily throughout the film as she struggles to compose herself and maintain her sanity but the terrible truth keeps pulling her deeper into an abyss of despair and webs of consequences left for her to untangle.
She calls her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) EVERY single night for tedious conversations and the pure exhaustion and completely drained sense of defeat Monroe conveys is brilliant work. So often, less is more, and Monroe channels that into every sigh, stare, and eventual scream. Ruth NEVER leaves her house where she’s lived alone for years and is a hoarder whose house is disgraceful with its musty carpets sewn into the floor, stairways overflowing with garbage and the furnace practically has a burnt scent.
Witt devilishly executes the neediness and psychological vanishing of this poor and pathetic woman whose way of living has a connection to Longlegs crimes. This connection is revealed in a hellscape final act for the ages. Underwood is effortlessly convincing as someone who believes solely in the facts and sees all of Longlegs notes as nonsensical distractions. He’s the only one able to separate his work and home life. He has a framed photo of Bill Clinton in his office on his wall. Needless to say, he’s not a hopeless person. He has a warmth to his life that Lee and Ruth were never able to reach and it’s all because of Longlegs whose influence in Lee’s life has vanished from her mind until the climax.
Longlegs is not in many scenes but when he is, he’ll chill you to the bones, possess them, and make them jump out of your body and run out the exit door. It’s a role that screams LEGACY for Cage without ever being too on the nose about it. He has white face paint, very long and unwashed hair, and a happily deranged, overly feminine way of speaking. The first time you see him in the opening, you only see his face from the bottom of his chin to the top of his mouth. He refers to a young Lee as “The Almost Birthday Girl” and howls with laughter and delight upon seeing Lee enter that interrogation room years later for the best interrogation scene in cinema since The Dark Knight. Another critic pointed out that Cage’s performance is a cross between Heath Ledger’s Joker and Miss Piggy, I agree wholeheartedly.
Monroe, an avid lover of the horror genre who's been a “Scream Queen” for most of her career has given a career-defying body of work. Things are going to skyrocket for her from here and she and Cage are the brutal heart and battered soul of Longlegs. The advertising for Longlegs has been very underwrapped, with just hints of what the film is and it delivers on all its promises of unspeakable terror. I laugh at even the most disturbing arthouse horror films. It takes a lot to frighten me. I was not laughing at Longlegs and it terrified me like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I found out J.D. Vance was Trump’s VP choice the MOMENT I got out of the theater, I mean talk about fate.
Now, it should be noted that writer/director Oz Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins, the original Norman Bates of Psycho. He was a closeted gay man who attempted conversion therapy and ultimately died of AIDS. Oz’s mother kept the secret and died herself as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the North Tower of the Twin Towers. Oz has described Longlegs as a film in which audience members can relate to inheriting their parents' version of the truth.
“Our parents are the most responsible for what works in us and what doesn’t work in us. We’re carrying them around. We’re sort of dragging our tattered childhood behind us everywhere we go, like shadows. For some people, it only comes up on Thanksgiving. Some people are in insane asylums because of it. Longlegs is the most baroque horror version of “What’s going on in my household?” Every kid probably feels to some greater or lesser extent.”
Longlegs has a very complex and applaudable range of symbolism for queerness. Historically and even today, queerness in horror is often linked to monstrosity. Social media’s begun debating whether Longlegs play into harmful tropes and as someone who doesn’t use social media, it seems many are defending Perkin’s vision. Thank god for it because as a gay man myself, I appreciated his ability to say so much without words on how queerness is tolerated (begrudgingly accepted) in society. Interestingly, most of the targeted families are the kinds of extreme nuclear family catholics whom society sees as a representation of goodness and purity while the devil's accomplices who carry out his crimes (Again, beginning in the 70s) are single working mothers like Ruth and a gay rock n roll hipster like the man Longlegs chooses to possess. It’s the devil intentionally selecting the kinds of people extremists see as “sinful” to wipe THEM out. Who is the devil here really and what is his real agenda?
Ruth, Longlegs’s human vessel, and ultimately Lee and Carter's lives are destroyed by Longleg's influence but the context of his victory is very much worth discussing. Queer people's lives often end from their oppressors' actions and attempts to destroy that has the same outcome because the ideal of ONLY ONE kind of family/dynamic/societal setup is a war and in wars, there are always multiple casualties. Longlegs is about the lost soldiers in that war, bleeding, sweating, and dying on the battlefields of a culturally recycled America, only just finding out they’re in a war but are now too late to win it. Longlegs is an ambitious, bombastic, and limitless exploration of terror and the answers to riddles that are right beneath our eyes.
“Longlegs.” TVGuide.Com, TV Guide, June 2024, www.tvguide.com/movies/longlegs/2000546869/.
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