Longlegs
Director: Oz Perkins
Cast: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt
Neon
4.5/5
Eventually, when people get too comfortable with the Trojan Horse, the evil becomes overt.
No more masquerading, no more effigies or shells possessed by unknown assailants, it’s just out in the open, and people just don’t care when it comes after their children either.
Longlegs feels like an indictment of our politics these days; where the evil is just there, and people just go along with it because the villains have the legs to keep coming back and farm the rage. It will keep coming back until it gets what it wants and by then everything will have been destroyed.
If it feels like I’m tip-toeing around telling you major plot points in Longlegs, well then you’re right. I don’t want to spoil this supernatural serial killer thriller. This is one of those films where the trailer doesn’t ruin the film for you. You have to watch it.
Longlegs starts in that 8 mm lens common in the 1970s and introduces us to the titular creep. After the unsettlingly comical introduction of the villain — and hero — we enter the early 1990s when protagonist Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) socially-awkwards her way through toxic masculinity. During an old knock-and-answer canvass for a serial killer, Harker gets a sense of exactly where another killer is living. That’s what we at the Superstitious Times like to call retrocognition.
A red-shirt agent gets sacrificed to the horror movie gods and that sets Harker on the fast track to work with Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) on a case too close to home. The paranormal element is injected when Harker is tested for her suspected psychic ability, which reminds me of the whole CIA funding the Stargate Project, which tested people with psychic abilities.
Regardless of Harker’s “half-psychic” ability, she has deep trauma that comes to the surface because of the intimacy she has with the case.
She’s also emotionally stunted: sitting on Carter’s daughter’s bed like a stiff mannequin, and referring to her mother — over the phone — as her “One and only daughter” who avoids answering the question of whether she says her prayers or not. Good Christian aside, the agnostic-appearing Harker is a hard worker and she cracks the cryptic letters left behind at the scenes of grisly family murders that are written off by the media as murder-suicides. (I picked up a Sinister vibe mixed with a little Insidious vibe too.)
Now, the Trojan Horse is a big theme in this film and one that the Scary Movie universe would gladly seize if the Wayans were still making those movies. The facilitator, or summoner of such a vessel, is played by the wild Nicolas Cage.
Cage has often played crazy or neurotic characters, but even Longlegs rises above the likes of Red Miller. He’s a little bit of a Satanic Tiny Tim and a whole lot of can’t-let-go-of-his-glam-rock-days. Be sure to pay special attention to the picture of Lou Reed on the wall, as it’s from his Transformer album, and quite telling of the mindset behind the killings.
The glam rock references tie the villain to his 1970s roots and keep us understanding that we’re just in Lee Harker’s world, and we’re trying to share the survivor experience with her.
There are little hints throughout the film that feel somewhat on the nose, from the brass Capricorn bottle opener hanging on the rear-view mirror, to “The Price is Right” theme when everything in the movie coalesces in its denouement.
It’s all fascinating how the movie comes together, and as mentioned the trailer doesn’t ruin it, like it so often does these days.
But what’s most important is reading between the lines of modern horror films. They’re telling us where we’ve been and where we’re going, and Longlegs is no different.
In a world where the religious right continues to pull the strings on American democratic freedoms, the social commentary is overt in Longlegs. The religious right is permeating democracy and slowly eroding it from the inside. We don’t even need the Trojan Horse anymore because people are that tired of fighting for it anymore.