Director Oz Perkins has been carving a nice little space for himself within the horror genre. Longlegs is his fourth feature film and definitely the one that will put him on the map as a horror director. I've seen one of his other movies--The Blackcoat's Daughter--and thought it was good, but unrelentingly bleak. Longlegs is scarier, funnier, and wilder than Blackcoat, but still taps into the overwhelming sense of dread that pervaded Blackcoat.
That said, Perkins is still rough around the edges. Longlegs is a good movie, and VERY scary...but the plot is a little all over the place and the movie feels more like a collection of scary ideas and images than a cohesive, well-crafted story.
I will go into full spoilers and plot description for those who like to read about scary movies with no intention of seeing them. For those who don't want to be spoiled--go see the movie! It's worth the price of admission, even if it's not perfect. Just make sure to empty your bladder beforehand so you don't mess up the theatre seats.
Longlegs primarily takes place in the 1990s. Actress Maika Monroe plays Special Agent Lee Harker (can't help but think of Dracula character Jonathan Harker), a young and green agent in a male dominated field. Feels very Clarice Starling, right? That's because Perkins was heavily inspired by The Silence of the Lambs...at least in the first half of the movie.
Lee impresses her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) by showing some signs of...mild psychic abilities? She is able to point out a house where a killer is hiding out on one of her first assignments. She just knows he's there. They do a test where Lee is asked to guess a random number between 0 and 100, and she guesses correctly 8 times out of 16. Thus, she is jokingly deemed "half psychic" by Carter.
Carter puts Lee on the case of a serial killer who has been active for decades. His MO is that he targets families with a daughter born one the 14th of a month and somehow compels the fathers to kill their wives and daughters. He leaves behind letters written in a code and signed "Longlegs".
(PS: Lee Harker's birthday is January 14th. Same as my dad's! Capricorns RISE UP).
After reviewing the case file, Lee points out some fairly obvious things, namely that there is never any evidence to suggest forced entry or that anyone else is laying a finger on these families. It's possible that Longlegs is never even in the house when the murders take place. But maybe someone else is? Someone the families trust enough to let in?
Lee gets an assist from Longlegs himself, who visits her isolated house in the middle of the woods in one of the scariest scenes. When Lee goes outside to investigate a noise, someone is seen inside her home. She discovers that Longlegs left her a birthday card and a key to the code, which helps her decode all his previous letters. This leads Lee and Carter to the home of the Camera family, where a murder took place, but the daughter, Carrie Ann Camera, was at school and thus survived the massacre.
First, they investigate the family barn, discovering a VERY CREEPY life size doll modeled after the young Carrie Ann. It even has human hair on its head. When dissected, it's revealed that there is a strange metal ball inside the doll's head. Lee spoints out to the skeptical Carter that in some cultures dolls are used in magical practices. Carter doesn't think magic has anything to do with anything.
They visit Carrie Ann (played by Kiernan Shipka) in the mental hospital where she's lived since the massacre of her family. Apparently, she had a visitor just the day before who signed in under Lee Harker's name. Since that visitor, Carrie Ann came out of years of catatonia and is now speaking again. She says a lot of weird shit to Lee, like that if "the man downstairs" told her to throw herself out a window, she'd be "pleased as peaches" to do so. Obviously, the visitor was Longlegs, and obviously he is exerting some kind of mind control on Carrie Ann.
Meanwhile, Perkins occasionally cuts to scenes with Longlegs, played by Nicolas Cage in heavy makeup. Longlegs as a character is truly unnerving. He looks WEIRD, he talks weird, he's just very weird. Which makes scenes with his character both funny and deeply disturbing.
At some point in all this, Carter shows Lee that her own mother made a phone call to the cops to report a trespasser in 1974, one day before Lee's 9th birthday. Carter thinks the trespasser may have been Longlegs himself. Lee visits her mother, Ruth (played by Alicia Witt), who is a deeply strange woman with vacant eyes and a dreamy quality. When Lee asks Ruth straight out what happened on her 9th birthday, Ruth just says "No" and refuses to engage. But she does tell Lee that she kept all Lee's stuff in her childhood bedroom. Lee discovers a box of polaroids, and in the biggest jump scare in the movie, it is revealed that Lee herself took a picture of Longlegs. Seeing him, Lee just knows that this is the guy.
Shortly after, they arrest Longlegs, whose real name is Dale Cobble and who appears to be a raving lunatic who worships Satan. Lee questions Longlegs who speaks to her in riddles (mixed with song lyrics), and pretty much straight up reveals the plot. After he speaks to her about "the man downstairs" and "the seventh she, who was given the same choice as all the rest--crimson or clover"...he states that his work is done and then proceeds to bang his own head on the table until he dies.
Carter is furious because he believes that Longlegs wasn't using any kind of magic or witchcraft, though he did have an accomplice, and that now he is dead they'll never find out who it was. He tells Lee to go back to her mother, who might have seen the accomplice.
Fans of horror movies...do you see where this is going?
Lee and another agent, Agent Browning, go back to Ruth's home. While Lee is inside, trying to find her mother, she hears a gunshot. She sees her own mother, dressed in a nun's habit, shooting Browing at point-blank range. When Lee run's outside to confront Ruth, Ruth is standing in front of a life size doll of young Lee. She shoots it in the head, and we see a black cloud leave Lee's head.
Then there is an exposition dump, told by Ruth to Lee and narrated like a fairytale ("Once upon a time, a little girl lived with her mother..."). Ruth explains how on Lee's 9th birthday, Longlegs came to murder them, but Ruth begged him to spare Lee's life and agreed to be his accomplice. Longlegs was a dollmaker who made super realistic dolls of little girls and put a metallic ball in each doll's head that were infused with...the power of SATAN! Ruth would visit the homes of the families marked for death and deliver the doll as "a gift from the church". Once the doll was inside, it would influence the father to kill their families. Ruth had to watch to make sure everything happened the way it was meant to. It destroyed her inside, but this was the choice she made to protect Lee.
Oh, by the way, Longlegs lived in Lee and Ruth's basement the entire time...this is where he made the dolls. The reason Lee didn't know is because she had her own doll that "told her where to look and what not to see", so she had no idea a man was living downstairs.
Lee wakes up to a telephone ringing in her mother's house. Upon answering it, a voice reminds her of Ruby Carter's birthday. Ruby is the daughter of Agent Carter. Lee shows up, but it's too late. Her mother is there in her nun's habit, having just gifted a doll to Ruby. Agent Carter murders his wife in the kitchen and when he comes out, Lee shoots him and then shoots her mother. She attempts to shoot Ruby's doll, but there are no bullets left. The final scene is Longlegs saying "Hail Satan!" and making a kissy noise at the camera.
WHEW.
So my biggest issue with Longlegs is that instead of allowing Lee to put all the pieces together, there is just an exposition dump that explains everything. It's more satisfying when the lead character makes discoveries as opposed to just being told what's going on.
Longlegs starts out as a fairly straightforward thriller/crime movie and then becomes supernatural. This is fine, but it also felt...messy. I mean, first of all there's a super creepy killer, but also he worships Satan, and then there are dolls that are imbued with Satan and influence people to kill...and Lee is tied to the whole thing. It's just too much. No wonder Perkins had to throw in the exposition dump. The movie would have been really long and convoluted otherwise.
You know how Coco Chanel said "After you get fully dressed, take on thing off"? Longlegs would have benefited from taking one element out. As it is, the movie just feels crammed with ideas--all of them very intriguing and spooky, for sure! But all together they take what could have been a well-balanced dish and turn it into a child's ice cream sundae, with every type of candy known to man thrown in.
I'm not super mad at it though, because the bones of a good horror movie--maybe even a great horror movie--are in here. Perkins just needed to trim the fat a bit. In terms of being scary, Longlegs does its job. I felt my soul leave my body a few times during the movie. But in terms of being a smart story, it's just not there. I'm hopeful that Perkins will continue to hone his craft and deliver as a truly great horror movie in the future.
Grade: B+
