After I saw Longlegs the other night, I was content with my take that it was an extremely dumb movie, brilliantly executed. That was that. But it seems to have occupied a mostly undeserved place in my brain, forcing me to keep thinking about it, not once, not twice, but as many times as it likes.
I’ve been trying to balance David Lynch’s philosophy of “the movie is the talking!” with the hope that I’ll find the one comment, review, or video essay that explains why I feel so conflicted about it. The best I’ve seen so far is from Erik Odeldahl on Bluesky:
For me it had the same vibe as the late 70s – 80s Argentos (Suspiria, Phenomena, Inferno). Super stylish and incredibly beautiful, with stories that kind of make sense but not really 🙂 With Longlegs, I kind of interpreted it as one big Satanic Panic joke too.
The Suspiria comparison is dead on: I have no problem thinking of that movie as a masterpiece, even though its story is pretty dumb. So how come I can accept that a European ballet academy would have a big, spare, liminal room full of razor wire, but the FBI not knowing the most basic personal information about its agents is too much for me to suspend my disbelief?
One of the differences is that Suspiria seems to me to have a sense of earnestness about it. I don’t think that Argento or any of the other filmmakers actually believed in ballet witches, but I do think they meant for the movie to be taken as it was presented, as a fantasy horror. With Longlegs, I could never shake the feeling that it was being insincere.
Earlier, I described it as “camp horror”1Camp as in straight-faced mockery, not as in the place where Jason Voorhies kills people, but that’s not right. I think it’s more accurate to say that it feels to me like “horror movie drag.”
It starts with something that’s stylized and artificial, but is often treated as if it were dead serious (gender expression, or Hollywood horror movies about FBI agents investigating serial killers). It takes the most recognizable signifiers and exaggerates them as far as possible. Then it presents itself as if it were the real thing, but with everybody involved knowing that it’s a performance. Turning the dials to maximum on all of the signifiers turns it into something else entirely. And if it “passes” as the real thing, that’s fine, but that’s not the point of it.
As I mentioned, I’ve been avoiding hearing the filmmakers explicitly say what their intentions were, but I have heard a few snippets from interviews with screenwriter and director Osgood Perkins.2Who is Anthony Perkins’s son, something that every single thing written about Longlegs felt was essential to mention, so I’m mentioning it here even though it’s not relevant to much of anything. One, paraphrased from my poor memory, says that the Silence of the Lambs format was something familiar and grounded that would pull audiences into the movie, until they realized that this was a different kind of movie entirely.
And I mean, I get that. Some of my favorite works of art have drawn heavily from that format established in Silence of the Lambs. And after years of repeating to myself that the narrative isn’t always the point of narrative art, and that I can appreciate art without having to write a book report to prove that “I got it,” I can finally appreciate something that is fully committed to style and doesn’t consider the narrative to be that important.
Even before I heard Perkins’s comment, I could tell that Longlegs wasn’t interested in being another FBI-investigating-a-serial-killer procedural; it wanted to give audiences a visceral feeling of dread and vulnerability, the certainty that something terrible was going to happen and there was nothing they could do to stop it. And a lot of people were able to say, “Nailed it! Good job,” and move on with their lives.
But it’s a sticking point that I haven’t been able to get over, because I think that the narrative draws too much attention to itself for me to ignore it as being unimportant.
The more I think about Maika Monroe’s performance, the more I love it. It’s obvious that the character was deliberately patterned on Jodie Foster’s transformation into Clarice Starling, but she has to be the interesting and sympathetic protagonist of almost every scene while also being numb and inscrutable. Really, all the performances are excellent. Especially an underrated one from Blair Underwood, who had to be one of the only normal people in a universe that was batshit weird. And I love Nicolas Cage’s casting — his performance is great but honestly, his being 1000% committed to a role is so much a part of his schtick now that this is actually one of his least unsettling performances. His character and make-up design are so perfectly eerie because (like Teddy Perkins from Atlanta) they’re over the top while not being completely unbelievable.
But then I remember how this fantasy version of the FBI doesn’t take note of the most basic information about its agents, like their birthday. Or their own children’s birthdays. Or the discovery you literally just made, that the murder victim who shares your daughter’s birthday had a lifelike doll that was brought to them by a stranger, and therefore it’s fine to let a random woman into your home with a doll that looks like your own daughter.
Or how an experienced FBI agent — even one who’s let her guard down because she can comfortably ignore the mountain of painfully obvious connections between your odd rookie agent and the series of deadly murders — could fail to hear someone walking up to her car in gravel.
There’s plenty more that’s too bizarre to be believable about this version of the FBI and the universe it inhabits. Like how Agent Harker is apparently on call at all hours, and she can get a call in the middle of the night and be expected to rush to a crime scene which is somehow in the daytime. Or how time and space work in general throughout the movie; scenes take place in day or night solely based on which will be creepier. And it’s difficult to tell how far apart any of the crime scenes are from each other, or how the agents visit a remote farm, a morgue (after an extended “autopsy” from an overworked coroner), and a sanitarium, all seemingly within the same day, but each at its own time of day.
But like the psychic abilities test, and Harker’s implausibly creepy house, I’m not that bothered by how much those strain credulity. I think they’re just meant to establish mood, and the details don’t really affect the plot. The bigger problem is in how much the FBI investigation story is intended to be used to drive the story.
In Silence of the Lambs, it’s basically the point of the entire movie. It’s still a Hollywood fantasy — even if it weren’t for the obvious stuff like keeping prisoners in an actual dungeon and a cell with a huge acrylic wall, or dragging Lecter out on a dolly with a mask and straitjacket, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone who’s actually been to Quantico said that the entire movie was ridiculous. But it needs to read as realistic. It’s entirely humorless, it’s full of actors giving career-defining performances, and it’s full of details intended to prove the creators have done their research.3In particular: the paste that agents put under their nose during an autopsy to mask the smell, and the scene where a senator keeps repeating the kidnapped woman’s name, which Clarice explains is a clever move to humanize her.
In Twin Peaks, it’s really just a framing device. Like Longlegs, it uses the format of a murder mystery because it’s familiar to the audience, even though it doesn’t consider solving the murder to be the main point. But as stylized as it is, it still stays true to the general format of a murder mystery. Cooper makes Sherlock Holmes-caliber deductions that lead him to the next clue, and even though the investigation gets deliberately weird, it still holds together. In Fire Walk With Me, the FBI angle just becomes pure visual language, with memorable dream-like imagery like the contact’s acted-out code language, or David Bowie wandering through fluorescent-lit government hallways and offices. And finally in Twin Peaks The Return, I believe the FBI angle was meant to deliberately frustrate the audience. To comment on how audiences treated the question of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” as if it were the purpose of the series, instead of just its instigating event.
And The X-Files was somewhere in between, using its FBI agents4Including a character who was initially more obviously a Clarice Starling analog and their cases as just the jumping-off point for each episode, with an occasional bit of Big Government Paranoia thrown in. The investigation hardly ever depended on Mulder and Scully actually having insight into a clue, but more often arguing over a clue until the subject of the episode put one or both of them into danger. In any case, crime-solving was never really the point of The X-Files, so it’s good that the series rarely made the investigation the focus.
So back to Longlegs: I’m not actually faulting it for not caring much about its serial killer mystery story. Honestly, I should’ve recognized much earlier that this was a fantasy version of the FBI that wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously, since it’s very early in the movie that we see Agent Harker subjected to a creepy and oppressive test to gauge her psychic ability. Instead, I’m faulting it for not caring about the investigation and then refusing to shut up about it.
So much of the movie is Harker in a dark windowless office, or a research library at night, or her insufficiently-lit cabin in the remote woods of Washington DC with huge windows but no curtains, poring over evidence, copying images from reference books, deciphering codes (using the Bible!) for secret messages. In a real movie, these scenes would be intended to show how the protagonist had made a uniquely insightful, or even lucky, connection that cracked the case wide open. In this movie, these scenes are intended to feel incredibly creepy and suspenseful, while you look for demonic shapes lurking in the darkness just outside the window or over Harker’s shoulder.
Ultimately, the problem as I see it is that horror and suspense movies are entirely dependent on the interplay between the filmmakers’ intentions and the audience’s expectations. More than any other genre, a horror or suspense movie demands that the audience is constantly making assumptions about what they’re being shown, and then recalibrating every time the filmmakers confirm or subvert those assumptions. Without that back-and-forth, it’s either completely passive, and without setting up and manipulating expectations, it’s just a series of cheap jump scares. Even the most charitable horror movie fan will say that that’s unsatisfying.
So it’s not enough for Longlegs to say “no for real, though, the FBI stuff doesn’t really matter,” when the audience expects all of this stuff to matter. If it is true that the FBI investigation format was chosen because it’s something that audiences are familiar with, then that’s all the more reason to be hyper-aware of all the connotations audiences are bringing with them. It seems almost unfair to bring up Hitchcock, but in Psycho5Huh. Maybe the connection was relevant after all. the whole subplot with the stolen money and Marion Crane being on the lam was deliberately emphasized because Hitchcock knew that audiences would be invested in that story. So when it’s abruptly cut short for no reason, it feels like even more of a shock and a senseless waste.
When Longlegs shows hours and hours of painstaking detective work and code-cracking, only to have the characters completely oblivious about the most obvious connections, it just feels like the movie is either having a laugh at somebody’s expense (ours? the characters? both?), or it’s a sloppy missed opportunity.
Maybe if the Zodiac message written on a birthday card had led to a discovery more obscure than that the victims all shared a birthday. (With the investigating agent. And the director’s daughter. UGH.) Maybe if anybody at the FBI thought it was odd that all of these murders were within a short drive of the investigating agent’s childhood home. Or if the mom’s involvement had been less direct than full-on accomplice — her “dark secret” could’ve simply been to let the doll in the house and drive her and her daughter crazy over the decades, and it’s only when Longlegs is killed that she becomes “activated” and tries to complete the pattern. Hell, even if the codes had been revealed to be mocking the agents for missing the obvious connections, I would’ve felt less frustrated.
Obviously, I’ve only spent so much time thinking about the movie, instead of just dismissing it, because there’s so much that it gets exactly right. And the creepiest moments have definitely stuck with me. I guess it’s given me a new appreciation for everything that goes into works of “style over substance,” and how much of the obligations of genre or storytelling device — how much you have to be aware of and satisfy the audience’s expectations — really are unavoidable.