Longlegs

Movie Review

How do you catch a killer who doesn’t actually do the killing?

Such is the bloody quilt that FBI Agent Lee Harker must piece.

The deaths are spread over decades. Homes become slaughterhouses, with whole families found shot, or stabbed or hacked to death. The killer? Almost always the father, who kills himself moments later.

And yet.

At each crime scene, authorities find a note covered in symbols—a secret, coded alphabet, apparently. The only legible word found is the signature.

LONGLEGS

No sign of forced entry. No fingerprints. No evidence that anyone else had been at the scene at all except for that note. Always that note. And that note is the only thread that strings these cases together; cases that have snaked over the last 20 years.

Well, not the only thread. There’s this: A girl was a member of each family—a girl whose birthday landed on the 14^th of any given month. And the killings themselves took place within six days—before or after—that birthday.

Curious.

But Agent Harker knows her way around curious cases. Shortly after she joined the force, she caught her first killer. She felt his presence, somehow, inside a cookie-cutter house in a nondescript neighborhood. That premonition didn’t save her partner, but it might’ve saved plenty of others.

So why not bring her into one of the Bureau’s most puzzling cases? Why not give Agent Harker’s premonitions a little room to run?

Harker is willing enough. Sure, the case is horrific, but the FBI rarely deals in happy, sunny little crimes. She can deal with it.

But soon, she must wonder.

As she researches the case at her cabin late one night, she hears a noise outside. When she investigates, she sees someone inside. When she runs back in, she finds … a note.

It’s filled with those same symbols, attached to some recognizable letters—as if the writer wanted her to decipher his cryptic clues. And, of course, it was signed.

LONGLEGS

Positive Elements

Harker and her FBI colleagues are determined to track down this killer, and that’s obviously a plus. Harker seems particularly driven to find him. In addition, the other agents we meet—Harker’s boss, Agent Carter, and Agent Fiske, both feel quite human and, at times, rather kind. Fiske even volunteers to go with Harker on a critical interview, outside her normal work purview.

We also meet Harker’s mom. She’s clearly not in a great place herself (we see some evidence of hoarding and a container filled with what appear to be medicinal syringes), and her actions throughout the film could certainly be criticized. But she’s very protective of Harker, and she’ll do anything she can to keep her alive.

Spiritual Elements

[Warning: This section contains some spoilers.]

“Have you been saying your prayers?” Harker’s mother asks her. “Our prayers protect us from the devil.”

And make no mistake, the devil is very much in play here.

Longlegs worships Satan, whom he calls “The man down the stairs.” (We hear him and others explicitly “hail” the demon.) And it appears that Satan is listening. The movie doesn’t just give us an unhinged killer with an unhealthy, but demented, religious fixation: His faith has meat to it, if you will, and the object of Longlegs’ worship seems to be engaged in the movie’s events. We even see his apparent shadow at one point. That “engagement” involves (without getting too spoilery) a form of possession facilitated by Longlegs.

But possession is hard to prove and, as Agent Fiske notes, worshipping Satan is protected by the Constitution.

Agent Carter seems skeptical of any “black magic or voodoo” connected to the case. But he’s also willing to at least entertain elements outside established science. It’s likely why Harker wound up on the case to begin with.

After Harker seems to have a premonition about where a killer is holed up, she undergoes some sort of a telepathic test (administered, it would seem, by the FBI), where she’s able to predict random numbers about half the time. (When Harker points out to Carter that she also failed half the time, Carter says that a “half psychic is better than none.”) On the Longlegs case, he can use whatever help he can get.

But until the end, Harker doesn’t really tell us what she thinks about either the psychic or spiritual phenomena in play. Clearly, Longlegs’ Satanism is important, and occult (and demonic) symbols eventually form a critical clue. And some sort of Christianity clearly has been influential in her life: She keeps a Bible on her desk, knows verses from it and even corrects one of her co-workers on the title of the Bible’s last book. (It’s ‘Revelation,’” she says. “No ‘s’.”)

We hear and read Bible verses. X’s, shaped like Latin crosses, point to a clue. A hefty crucifix, attached to a floor, covers a secret. A woman dressed up as a nun appears in several scenes, offering gifts from “the church.” (Those gifts are clearly not from the Christian Church, though the recipients may think they are.) A preacher is killed. A televangelist is seen preaching and praying on a black-and-white TV. Lifelike dolls form an important part of the story, and someone mentions that “75 cultures use dolls” in magical ceremonies. (Carter argues that they’re not chasing a witch doctor here, though.) When someone dies, there’s a suggestion that he’s been “set free.”

One more note: Harker’s mother asks Harker again whether she’s been saying her prayers. When Harker admits that she hasn’t—and that, in fact, she never did, because the prayers scared her, her mother laughs and now agrees with her. “Our prayers don’t do a g-dd–n thing,” she says. And indeed, while the devil is very much in play in Longlegs, God’s active involvement is not to be seen.

Sexual & Romantic Content

A woman removes her clothes and sits on a chair in her underwear, rubbing a huge knife across her exposed belly. Agents Carter and Fiske exchange a friendly, but ribald, joke. You read, and hear, some kinda sleezy song lyrics from a 1971 T-Rex song.

Violent Content

Longlegs has “killed” nearly a dozen families by the time Harker joins the case: We hear that two of the mass killings were perpetrated via shotgun, eight by knife, and one by an axe. We see some bloody photos and flashbacks of the crime scenes, and we’re treated to an extensive flashback or two of the axe murders. The camera cuts away quickly when blows are struck, but we see sprays of blood.

Harker and Carter investigate a crime scene, where at least two corpses are in bed. When the covers are pulled aside, one corpse—that of, apparently, a girl—is in a state of extensive decay, her face covered in maggots.

Someone is shot to death via shotgun, spraying blood all across the inside of a car. Two others are shot in the head; the wounds are obvious, and the blood of one victim pools around the body. Someone smashes his own face repeatedly into a table—each blow doing grotesque damage. By the time the person dies, the nose and most of the teeth are shattered or missing, and moviegoers can see the skeletal structure underneath. People can be smattered by blood, or smear the stuff across their faces. A dummy—representing a child—is stabbed by the mother of the real child.

A character is shot twice in the chest, leaving bloody marks on the wall behind. Someone is stabbed off camera (but we hear the stabs and screams). One of Longlegs’ notes threatens to cut off someone’s breasts. A woman, under Longlegs’ control, calmly tells Harkins that she’d happily kill herself—or Harkins—if she felt the “man downstairs” wanted her to.

Crude or Profane Language

Four f-words and two s-words. We also hear “b–ch,” “g-dd–n”  and two abuses of Jesus’ name.

Drug & Alcohol Content

Agent Carter drinks whisky. Late one evening, Agent Carter tells Harker that he’s thirsty and invites her to have a drink with him. When Harker tells him that she doesn’t drink, he says, “I’ll drink while you tell me things.” That evening, after she talks about the case, Carter stands up and is clearly a little wobbly. Harker drives him home.

Other Noteworthy Elements

Someone vomits onscreen. Characters engage in some pretty huge lies. Judging from the reactions from some characters, corpses are definitely getting smelly.

Conclusion

A few words come to mind when I think about Longlegs: Disquieting. Unsettling. Grotesque.

Words that don’t? Suitable for unaccompanied teens.

But don’t tell that to at least one Brooklyn branch of Alamo Drafthouse. From ScreenAnarchy:

“For every teenager’s dream to see an R-rated film without their parents, they will now get the chance to do so.  NEON announced … that, in partnership with the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Brooklyn, they will be giving people under the age of 17 the opportunity to ditch their guardians for one night on Friday, July 12th, and see the long awaited theatrical release of Osgood Perkins’ LONGLEGS. Parents can rest easy knowing their precious child will be chaperoned by bloody-faced nuns.

Neon and Alamo apparently require a “signed permission slip,” though signed by who goes unaddressed.

We don’t normally tell y’all what to see or not to see here at Plugged In. But I’d argue that Longlegs is not appropriate for 15-year-olds. I might even argue it’s not appropriate for a whole lot of 55-year-olds.

Is Longlegs effective? Yes. Nicolas Cage’s titular serial killer is a misshapen, effeminate monster with a doughy face, a Julia Child-like voice and a mass of unsettling tics and phrases. Harker, played by scream queen Maika Monroe, is a rigid, vulnerable protagonist whose own sense of growing terror begins to mirror our own. The sets and cinematography are designed to push us off balance, encouraging us to look for monsters in every dark window or around every skewed corner.

But Longlegs is more than unnerving. It’s dispiriting. This is a film I’d rather forget.

I’ve seen gorier movies, even this year. But this felt different. Perhaps because so many of the victims were children. Perhaps because of the infernal nature of the killer. Perhaps because the film was so willing to embrace a supernatural Satanic mastermind but refused to acknowledge any Christian counter. (The Hebrew word “Satan,” can be translated into the word “adversary,” but Longlegs leaves that adversary unopposed, allowing him to run roughshod through the film.)

When I was a kid, I loved playing with daddy long-legs—those spindly spiders that hunker down in your family garden. I’d pick them up, carry them around and proudly show them to my parents. They were ideal playthings, really—posing no threat at all to a 5-year-old such as myself. They don’t bite. And even if they did, you wouldn’t be able to feel it.

But Longlegs, the movie, you feel. And it’s nothing I care to pick up again.