Against My Better Judgement, I Watched Longlegs

I don't believe I've ever seen as effective a marketing campaign for a film as I did for Oz Perkin's recent horror-slash-serial-killer-procedural "Longlegs." I've heard it compared to the legendary marketing techniques for 1999's infamous The Blair Witch Project, and though that film was slightly before my time, legends come through the pipeline every so often. Well, I get to live some of those legends for myself, for better or worse, because the marketing team for Longlegs was firing on all cylinders and then some with cryptic and extremely well-edited trailers that didn't actually reveal the real name of the movie for a while, some promotional billboards that left something of a mental scar, and even a custom phone number with a voice recording by Nicholas Cage, who plays the titular serial killer in this film (it's no longer functioning). Now, I'm not much of a horror film guy. I don't go around chasing scares, and I think that out of every genre, horror tends to have the most misses. However, the marketing for Longlegs was so off the wall that I couldn't help but wonder if Longlegs could actually live up to the unprecedented and, frankly, unreplicated hype it was building for itself. So, did it?

Well....not really.

Now, Longlegs is by no means a terrible film, and it has a lot of redeeming qualities, but in a lot of ways, the other-worldly marketing that actually convinced me to watch something I would not have watched for any other reason kind of ended up letting Perkins' project down just a little bit. I guess what I'm saying here is that it's a perfectly serviceable movie that promised to be so much more than it actually turned out to be, and so I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed, even though I knew that what I had watched was actually a legitimately serviceable movie. And there's one more thing that more mainstream reviewers aren't really going to talk about in length: yes, this movie is about an FBI agent trying to catch a satanic serial killer. I am aware that some of you are probably wondering what a blog post about a film like this is doing on a review site run by a Christian, and in some ways, I ask myself that question as well. I did have a lot of misgivings about this film, and I must say that after watching it once, I will probably never watch it again. I think that in some ways, I'm glad I watched it, and in others, I kind of wish I hadn't. But here we are. I might as well review it.

To throw out that spoiler-free synopsis that will protect the integrity of this film's marketing campaign, Longlegs, a fictional story set in 1990s Oregon, follows a female FBI agent named Lee Harker as she investigates a series of family annihilations that all have two defining features: all the cases are murder-suicides carried out by the father, and at all of the crime scenes was left a cryptic letter signed with one word: Longlegs.

I think that I want to talk about the obvious here first: the technical aspects of Longlegs are on absolute full throttle, and it's extremely impressive to see. I've rarely, if ever seen such a complete and immersive audio-visual experience as this. Every sound you hear, whether it be diegetic or a music cue, sounds otherworldly good, and the cinematography of this film is creative and weirdly unnerving, playing well with the natural scenery and practical effects that are so prevalent in this film, and thankfully so (more on that later). The score in this film is very prevalent and extremely unnerving. It's minimalistic but relentless and really adds to the overall tone of the film. The editing team went absolutely nuts with both the actual film and the promotional material surrounding it, and I think it's pretty clear that they either had a passion for this movie, really enjoyed their jobs, or both. The way this film presents itself is so shocking and so horrifying, and yet somehow so appealing. The world is definitely ours, but it just looks so wrong. The scenery in this film can often look really alien despite being immediately recognizable as rural America (Oregon to be precise), and I chalked this up to the spectacular color grading and smart camera work courtesy of Andrés Arochi, a really small-name cinematographer out of Mexico City, who I imagine will probably get a lot of job offers in the future after his work on Longlegs. By keeping the visual element of this film very grounded, Perkins kind of hits a nerve that makes this film feel eerily real and simultaneously nightmarish. To bounce off of this point, the shooting location scouts for this film obviously did their homework, as Longlegs is easily one of the most immersive films I've seen this year. The sets in this film are the other side of the coin that the cinematography is on, and let me say, this film's world is incredible. Not once was I thrown out of immersion, and it was nice to see that a film with such a unique and frightening visual element could sustain this impressive mood throughout.

A well-made horror movie needs to be able to inspire fear, and while it was probably a given the moment we saw the technical prowess of the people in charge of the promotional material, I can assure you that, yes, Longlegs is extremely scary. On a site dedicated to measuring the scariness of any given film, Longlegs is the 11th scariest film of all time (when compared to all films with at least 5 ratings on the site). So while that may sound like an appeal to authority, my point is that this movie is beyond scary: it's downright terrifying at points, and it accomplishes this by hitting you over the head repeatedly with a pretty-much-unparalleled sense of atmosphere. This movie doesn't just look putrid and dangerous. It feels putrid and dangerous in a way that I've never seen replicated by any other horror movie, and this is pulled off by the fusing of expert cinematography, intelligent horror film tricks, and impressive acting from Nicholas Cage, who plays himse... I mean, the titular serial killer Longlegs. Of course, this movie contains the trademark jumpscares and tense moments that we see in every horror movie, but what makes Longlegs different from other horror outings is its unapologetically oppressive tone. I've been saying for ages that movies need to get their head out of the gutter of mediocrity and be willing to delve into the mood of their world more often, and finally, we're starting to get movies that are actually doing this! See what happens when you listen to me? I jest, but the world of Longlegs is unparalleled by just about any horror movie that has ever been and, if the film industry keeps going the way it is, ever will be. It's a moody mix of Oregon farms and off-putting but beautiful horror movie cinematography that really complements the organic and unnervingly grounded vibe this film is obviously trying so hard to go for while also lending a strange familiarness to the film that is, in turn, offset by a pervasive and unsettlingly evil vibe at points, for lack of a more accurate adjective, due mostly to an eerie groundedness, unsettling and unnatural framing, wonderfully putrid coloring schemes, and a refreshing amount of fleeting, was-it-really-there scenery. Jumpscares aren't really this film's go-to. It's far less interested in short-term exploits and far more interested in a festering and slow-burning corrosion of your nerves.

But despite all of its technical prowess, Longlegs just doesn't match that same visual passion with its story. If this were any other film, I would have likely dismissed it right off the bat because, narratively, Longlegs is nothing short of an absolute mess. The pacing for this film is virtually non-existent, at points burning too slowly for a film under two hours long and at others flying by like a Boeing 747. And I get that exposition is necessary, but Longlegs goes absolutely ham with long, expository explanations whenever they can possibly be used, absolutely blind and deaf to more subtle and similarly fundamental tools like show-don't-tell. I get that this is a serial killer film with a supernatural twist, so there's going to be a level of exposition here and there, but geez, this movie outdid itself in trying to explain everything, and this became kind of frustrating after a while when I would have been perfectly happy with being shown some things or even getting left in the dark on others because the best mystery stories are sometimes those that remain a mystery even after the curtains have closed or the credits have rolled, letting audiences talk amongst themselves about the meaning of the work of art that they just saw, and Longlegs just simply didn't do any of these things enough for me.

In addition, is it off-limits for me to say that the characters in this film were, I don't know, a little bland? This sounds and looks a little strange to me rolling off of my keyboard because I know that the acting was a big selling point for this film, and I do want to say that Nicholas Cage gave a heck of a performance. He really did. But I won't really remember anyone else in this film, not even the main protagonist of Longlegs, Maika Monroe's Lee Harker, who I can only assume was written with characters the likes of Clarice Starling in mind. Lee just didn't do it for me. She was just bland and relatively uninteresting. What's frustrating is that she should have and easily could have been so much more, because she's got some interesting aspects to her character that could have been expanded upon in even rudimentary ways. It's not hard to give a character different levels, but Lee felt less like a person and more like a very straightforward, protagonistic force rather than a person with thoughts, feelings, desires, and fears. It was a little disappointing because Monroe isn't even bad in the role. Her acting is pretty alright and her unusual abilities interesting, but I constantly found myself wishing that the screenplay had given her, one, more to do in the story, and two, more of a reason to exist in this story than "Nicholas Cage needs an opponent of some kind." Longlegs constantly felt like it prioritized style over substance, and nowhere was this more apparent than when it came to the film's characterization and especially its characterization of Lee.

In a lot of ways, this film reminded me of one of Denis Villeneuve's first big-stage efforts, his 2013 film Prisoners. It's got a decent amount of things going for it, but it always falls back on its strong aspects without ever bothering to even patch the very obvious holes it has in it. The makers of Longlegs like their style a lot, and I don't blame them. However, the film never takes the time to appropriately dive into the bread and butter of good filmmaking. Longlegs is ultimately an original film, and I can appreciate it for being that, but I can't help but wish that it had taken the time to be a better one. I saw some other reviewers complaining that this film tacked too many elements onto itself and became watered down, and as far as this complaint goes, I actually have to disagree with this critique. The one thing that is never an issue with Longlegs is its artistic vision, and I personally think that its style and mood are a tremendous accomplishment. I merely find myself wishing that the film had more underneath it to keep this vision above water. And ultimately, all of this said, this isn't really a movie I would or could recommend to everyone, being a Christian and all. It's insanely dark and maybe even demonic, possibly more so than almost any other film I've ever seen. A lot of the subject matter is about some blatantly satanic clues regarding the case that Lee is investigating, as well as an amount of that satanism that creeps into her personal life in less-than-subtle ways. This is a film that could have easily been made sans the twists regarding the occult, given that a lot of the aspects of the film that have to do with this rather apparent satanism feel like additions rather than fundamentals. And while I get that some people get a kick out of all that, I don't, and I'm going to make that known and clear. Even if it's not objective criticism per se, this film rubbed my personal beliefs in a wrong and sometimes hostile way, and I know that it will do the same for a lot of others. I watch a lot of movies, including a lot of movies that other believers would find to be objectionable. But this film tested me, and frankly, I don't desire to revisit it any time soon. But yeah, take that last part how you will, just knowing that this film pushed even me, a guy who regularly watches and even likes movies that a lot of other believers wouldn't even consider watching in the first place.

On a critical level, Longlegs too often feels like an exercise in style and doesn't feel like it's actually about anything often enough. But I would be lying if I said the style in question wasn't absolutely stunning.

Longlegs - 6/10

1 John 4:1-3