Longlegs (2024)

directed by Osgood Perkins

Canada/USA

101 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This may be the only new film besides Ultraman: Rising that I review this year. I've severely fallen out of the loop with new horror, and that used to make me feel guilty, but now I'm mostly okay with it. I'll get around to stuff when I get around to it.

I'm inherently skeptical of any movie focusing on Satanic Panic themes. The phenomenon is a bit like the witchhunts of late medieval Europe and colonial America: the witches weren't real, but the hunt was, and it had devastating consequences. The two subjects are similar also in that there are a lot of people who view it on an aesthetic level (E.G. Salem's thriving tourist industry), which can feel really disrespectful to the victims and their families. I think Longlegs handles this fairly well because it's level-headed about what there actually was to fear about the possibility of a network of Satanic cults throughout America: serial killers, actual serial killers, not random rock musicians encoding backwards messages into their records or Harry Potter books encouraging children to do witchcraft. I'm going to assume Perkins has thought about these things and how to depict them with as much sensitivity towards real-world people as possible while still creating an effectively scary, authentically Satanic movie.

I think I mentioned in my review of Skinamarink how interesting it is when a horror movie uses the type of lighting and set decoration that my brain associates with coziness or a feeling of being comfy and safe at home: enclosed, lived-in spaces with low ceilings lit softly by lamps or a single light on somewhere in the house, usually at night, sometimes in the dark parts of the year. A lot of Longlegs takes place in lighting like that. When this is done right, the effect can be discomfiting in an almost subconscious way, and I think Longlegs does it very right - it front-loads with these types of scenes, giving us a lot of shots of Harker within her quiet house or her workplace after dark, but it also introduces horror into that environment, giving us the feeling, for the rest of the film, that the environments we think could be a refuge might actually harbor demons.

I've seen a few people saying that Satan is not a scary enough villain. I'm one of those people, but I also don't think that necessarily has to effect the way I feel about Longlegs, because even if I don't think Satan is scary (because I don't think he's real), I can still accept and become absorbed in a movie where the people in the movie think Satan is real, or where Satan actually IS real, within the context of the story. It's like watching haunted house movies when you don't believe in ghosts. And again, this is a thing that I think Perkins probably payed attention to: depicting a full-frontal Baphomet holds no surprises; there's no real scares to be had in black metal imagery. So instead he has these hints of something terrifying and otherworldly peppered throughout the film. There's one split-second shot of a silhouette against a glass door that stood out as one of the best moments in the film, to me.

I'm not sure how I feel about the way Longlegs really does seem to move further into the supernatural and weird as it goes on. I realize the irony of saying this about a movie that posits that Satan is real, but the whole plot element with the dolls failed to land in my eyes because it feels like it just goes too far out. It's too complicated. There's too much left unexplained. "Everything happened because Satan" is a simple explanation, but it's one that makes sense because it's been done before. Expecting me to accept some kind of weird metaphysical transfer of energy into a series of creepy dolls that somehow have mind control powers and can be used to allow Satan to infiltrate people's homes and drive them to murder each other is just... no, actually, no thanks, that's weird, I don't want that in my otherwise fairly grounded horror movie.

I disliked Gretel & Hansel on everything save for an aesthetic level for much the same reason as above. It could have been a really solid The Witch-style folk horror, but Perkins does all this weird stuff with it that leaves it feeling more fantastical than I feel suited its premise.

I've always like Maika Monroe, and though I was doubtful of casting somebody as recognizable as Nic Cage as the villain, I think what they do with him is really interesting - putting him in such heavy facial prosthetics that you can't really tell who he is lets him lend his inherent Nic Cage-ness to a character other than himself. I think that was a good choice. I guess your enjoyment or non-enjoyment of Longlegs boils down to how much of it you want to take seriously, because there is a lot in it that cannot be taken seriously at all. Overall, it's alright. Watch it in a vacuum without having seen any previews or read any reviews and you will probably get more out of it.