Longlegs
Bad trees bear bad fruit.
Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, cold and stiffly human in a beautifully tempered performance) may be young, but she has an intuition for FBI work beyond her years and experience. While on an ordinary door-knocking search for a suspect, she gets the sense that one of the six identical houses in a nondescript cul-de-sac contains the man they’re looking for. She can’t explain how she knows. We hear what she hears: a rush of feedback from an electric guitar, followed by the words of her partner, distorted as though she’s hearing them from underwater. The door-knocking mission is doomed, and we (and she) know it. This can only end one way: in blood.
Harker’s intuition precisely suits her work, even though it runs counter to the protocols she must work within. She is able to divine facts that have eluded others, leading her boss to assign her to a serial-killer cold case, which comes roaring back to life under her careful investigation. A series of murders of entire families, each one bearing a tinge of the Satanic, connected by ciphers left at the scene of the crime by someone who refers to himself as “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage, committed as always). Serial killers are scary, but they at least provide a killer to point to. This killer seems to be able to get his victims—otherwise upstanding members of their churches and communities—to do his work for him. As Harker’s investigation picks up, so does the feeling that she’s being watched, even helped along, by a shadowy figure who haunts both her memories and the woods surrounding her house.
Everything is connected, though writer/director Osgood Perkins’s script remains coy about the exact how and why. Longlegs is more concerned with cultivating a mood than it is with fitting every single piece together. No matter how good Harker’s investigation is, there’s a thread of the supernatural that refuses to be dismissed through scientific means. The story is framed in a matter-of-fact manner: the low-angle, serious camera shots watches Harker bent over her evidence as though she’s being observed from below at a great distance. A malevolent force is at work here, and the faded color grading, like underlit photographs that have been forgotten in a box somewhere, implies that the darkness is only going to get deeper.
Most upsetting are the ways in which otherwise rational adults in the film are able to justify the actions they take in order to protect their own. Longlegs does not attempt to explain away the lies we tell in order to sleep at night nor the deals we strike in order to protect the ones we love. It simply presents a rotten core of hypocrisy at the heart of a wholesome appearance. Church attendance and a devout appearance are just outward signifiers. Evil can take root anywhere. Its fruit is apparent once ripe, but the ripening process is yearslong, patient, and slow enough that it’s easy to deceive yourself into believing that it doesn’t exist. The ugly truth, once revealed, is upsetting. That doesn’t make it any less true. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★☆
Longlegs is in theaters now.