By Whatever your stance is on the recent wave of horror films, it’s apparent that their popularity is soaring. That is certainly the case for Longlegs, the most recent film from director Oz Perkins. Longlegs is an eerie and dreadful dive into the belly of the beast with some of the most creative marketing and design since Barbarian.
Longlegs
Director: Oz Perkins
Release Date: July 12, 2024 (Theatrical)
Rating: R
Longlegs follows FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she finds herself determined to apprehend the killer known as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). Leaving no physical evidence at the scenes of his crimes, apart from his encoded messages, the trail of murdered families eventually grows cold. Lee’s intuition leaves her at the helm of solving the case and drags her far deeper into a web of Satanism, hypnosis, and danger than she expects.
Longlegs opens with a flashback to a young girl – later revealed to be Lee – as a strange and dangerous man makes contact with her. Flash forward several years and Lee is now working the field for the FBI. She quickly proves to have a sixth sense, correctly guessing the house of another killer. At the insistence of her superior, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), Lee begins to work on decoding the mythos around Longlegs. She cracks the code on his messages and even solves his “algorithm” surrounding how he picks his victims, leaving only the mystery who he is and how he kills.
From NEON.
As Lee further entrenches herself in the case of Longlegs, she discovers a strange doll at the scene of an old crime. The doll was fashioned to look like the only survivor, Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka). After visiting Carrie Anne in the hospital and realizing that Longlegs knows more about Lee than is truly possible, Lee returns to her mother’s home to search for clues. It’s in her old bedroom that she uncovers an old photo of the strange man from the beginning of the film, presumably Longlegs. Using this photo, Lee and Carter are able to find and apprehend the mysterious man.
Not long after Longlegs has been detained, Lee attempts to talk to him to see if he has an accomplice who might carry out the rest of the murders. He mentions Lee’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) before committing suicide by repeatedly slamming his head on the table. Shaken, Lee returns to her mother’s house. Ruth kills Lee’s superior agent and shoots the head off of a Lee doll, releasing Lee from the influence of Longlegs and proving to be his accomplice. It’s shown that the dolls are how Longlegs influences these murders, as within each doll is a “brain” containing an element of the devil.
From NEON.
The film ends at Agent Carter’s house; his daughter is having a birthday party and Ruth’s mother has brought a doll of her as a “gift.” Lee arrives in time and must kill Agent Carter and her own mother to save Carter’s daughter, but she is unable to kill the doll.
Longlegs is a horror film that operates on a couple of different levels of fear. On the surface, it’s a story about a Satanic man who uses hypnosis through dolls to murder entire families. But beneath that lurks an even more sinister tale – fears manifested and exploited by institutions within America. Longlegs is rooted in specific American iconography and uses space to twist them into something infinitely more sinister.
From NEON.
We have the constant framed photographs of US Presidents, dolls, rock-and-roll, and suburban/rural family homes. Things that we are told are there for our protection (law enforcement, government, religion) end up being the same forces that allow the evil to seep in. The family unit is bastardized – the mother despises her children, the father turns from a protector to a killer, the little girl is “replaced” – revealing the facade of these institutions.
While I think the filmmaking and acting are strong in Longlegs, I think the overall story would have worked better if it leaned less into the supernatural elements. The dolls were effective, but making the Satanic elements “real” rather than products of fear lessened my overall liking of the film. With the two most obvious influences of Longlegs being Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, it would be more impactful for the horror of Longlegs to hide a little under interpretation. What is scary is not a haunted doll, but the vulnerability that leads to fear and violence.
From NEON.
Thankfully, Perkins doesn’t hammer in the Satanic/cult elements and leaves a lot more to be feared in Longlegs. The resulting experience is harrowing as we see how easily these institutions crumble in the face of unspeakable evil, from Lee’s own mind to the very fibers of America. Longlegs is the kind of film that will stick with viewers and inspire conversations about our obsessions with true crime and cults, and the way that we consume and create fear.
