D+Directed by Osgood Perkins Starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage Review by Jon Kissel |  |
There’s a part in the excellent documentary Hail Satan where a member of the satirical Satanic Temple talks about the irony of the Satanic Panic, where seemingly all of American culture imagined ritualistic sexual abuse and demonic rituals in every dark basement with a heavy metal poster on the wall and Dungeons and Dragons in the cabinet, only for that same vision of sexual abuse to be later uncovered in churches perpetrated by priests and ministers. Osgood Perkins’ horror hit Longlegs wonders, what if James Dobson was right? What if Satan really was infiltrating families in the form of an effeminate metal freak, corrupting them in the service of the dark lord himself? This Robert Eggers-esque approach, where the belief system of a subculture is treated as true, utterly fails in Longlegs. It’s one thing to conjure Norse mythology or Puritan paranoia, and it’s another to plumb a phenomenon so recent, that the falsely accused continue to rot in prison.
Set in the early 90’s, coincidentally the same time that Silence of the Lambs was released, Longlegs stars Maika Monroe as a chilly female FBI agent with a talent for pattern recognition and no small amount of spooky intuition. Monroe’s Lee Harker is put on a case involving familial murder-suicides, in which the fathers kill the whole family shortly after a daughter’s ninth birthday. Unraveling these crimes leads her to Longlegs, a pale man with stringy hair and bad makeup, given to bursts of shrieking worthy of a scream metal vocalist. This weirdo is, of course, played by Nicolas Cage, and Perkins delights in cutting to him going about his daily errands. The film continues to pull from other recognizable horror movies under an elevated horror veneer of compacted aspect ratios and consistent color palettes, which here is brown.
Longlegs arrives years too late to be anything more than a ripoff. Setting aside its premise, which I find personally offensive, the film is every detective/serial killer/satanic trope blended into a brown slop. There’s nowhere for the on-the-spectrum detective to go anymore, and Monroe doesn’t find a new angle beyond affectless. The father-turned-evil idea is at least as old as The Amityville Horror and The Shining. Cage unsurprisingly plays his character as big as he’s ever played any character, but it’s not as much an actor’s choice as it is a cover for how empty and uninteresting Longlegs himself is. The books of Thomas Harris that inspire so much of this film have to locate the insanity of their characters in a realistic place. Perkins hand-waves everything away with magic.
It's not that I don’t appreciate films that find a place for Satan. End of Days is a great deal of fun, and 2024 had its big devil delivery system with the far superior First Omen. Those films work by ratcheting up the stakes all the way to the Antichrist, and therefore revel in this absurd mythology. A devil that just wants to kill families is too mundane, too close to the real world. It feels insulting to blame anything on the devil, especially knowable crimes that happen often enough that unaffected people can remember the odd detail. Longlegs has no insight into how such a thing could happen, and instead comes off as exploitative as a clueless true crime investigator. D+
Longlegs arrives years too late to be anything more than a ripoff. Setting aside its premise, which I find personally offensive, the film is every detective/serial killer/satanic trope blended into a brown slop. There’s nowhere for the on-the-spectrum detective to go anymore, and Monroe doesn’t find a new angle beyond affectless. The father-turned-evil idea is at least as old as The Amityville Horror and The Shining. Cage unsurprisingly plays his character as big as he’s ever played any character, but it’s not as much an actor’s choice as it is a cover for how empty and uninteresting Longlegs himself is. The books of Thomas Harris that inspire so much of this film have to locate the insanity of their characters in a realistic place. Perkins hand-waves everything away with magic.
It's not that I don’t appreciate films that find a place for Satan. End of Days is a great deal of fun, and 2024 had its big devil delivery system with the far superior First Omen. Those films work by ratcheting up the stakes all the way to the Antichrist, and therefore revel in this absurd mythology. A devil that just wants to kill families is too mundane, too close to the real world. It feels insulting to blame anything on the devil, especially knowable crimes that happen often enough that unaffected people can remember the odd detail. Longlegs has no insight into how such a thing could happen, and instead comes off as exploitative as a clueless true crime investigator. D+
RSS Feed