Longlegs has broken records this weekend for Neon as its highest ever grossing film and the biggest opening for a horror film for the year. Neon’s been responsible for five of the last five Palm d’Ors in Venice (Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, and this year’s Anora, forthcoming in October!) so it always made sense that Longlegs had some LONG LEGS in the box office. The trailer was a thing of nightmares. Probably the most creepypasta pastiche of images one could conjure. Sam Adams makes the point that the movie’s marketing is a kind of misdirect and some of the other reviews have picked up on this. Austen Goslin at Polygon makes the distinction between scary and spooky and says that there are a lot of moments in the film that are made for the audience to laugh from how tense things are, deadpan humor and just out of the box creep stuff, which is also what I thought was a mark of genius in the first It reboot.
Most of what I want to talk about is spoilery, so I think maybe come back to this after watching, but the way that Sam Adams wants to break down this movie is by talking about the way in which it doesn’t actually have an element of suspense, which I thought was an interesting and perceptive way of talking about the way that the mystery of the film is revealed for anyone thinking remotely hard in the theater past the first act. Rather, Adams suggests, the movie is about inevitability and the tragic terror of watching something lurch to its final obvious conclusion. Put in those terms, yeah it’s fun to see how once Maika Monroe’s Lee Harker character gets drawn into the case, she slowly begins to recognize her own involvement in the violence which draws in more investigation and more witnesses and more conjecture and a deepening of the problem in an almost Oedipal way: how Oedipus very happily investigates the murders of the royal family at Thebes because he is certain in his own innocence.
All the while Longlegs’s dialogue (“friend of a friend,” “the Man Downstairs,” his parroting of his victims, and rock ballads, creepy letters) gives you so much to mull over during the daylight sequences. His entire performance is absolutely fucked up. Maika Monroe, fresh off of Watchers, plays the deadpan, repressed, hard-nosed stick in the mud with just the barest spark of clairvoyance so well. The concept of assigning psychic (“highly intuitive”) detectives to cold cases is so intriguing, and the director’s interest in Satanic ritualism and playing with the cinematic rules of magic and reality make the film really fun as well. So much of the mystery of the murders has to do with tying Longlegs to the murders which only seem to be prompted by him, not committed, which leads us to a means rather than a motive question. The final scene gives us the means in the tensest, most terrible way, the micro-expressions that run past the actors’ faces as they force out their lines is burned into my brain.
Aspect ratio experimentation is absolutely fabulous. The tiny square for flashbacks is tense and claustrophobic and also gives the storytelling a visual lexicon which is legible and clever.
Osgood Perkins’s interview with Variety is a really lovely debrief if you are so inclined for some thoughts from the director about how he came up with the villain, some of the ideas behind the rules of the world, and the like.
