Beneath a glossy veneer and bewitching performances, Longlegs has no leg to stand on

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Once in a while, a film will come along and remind us that there’s mileage in the old saying, “too much of a good thing”. Standing out are Olivia Wilde’s 2022 misfire Don’t Worry Darling, a cliched cookie-cutter of dystopian film and TV that relied heavily on gorgeous set design and costume to mask an absence of storyline; and Greta Gerwig’s 2023 Barbie, a film so replete with desperate memetics and faux self-awareness that it seems to exist within its own vacuum of acceptable filmmaking. But in an age where attention span is scarce and brain-rot premium, and where aesthetics are tightly compacted into ephemeral moods and vibes (“slay”, “demure” et al.), it’s understandable that film execs feel hard-pressed to find guaranteed ways of luring in audiences and keeping them engaged.

The latest movie from indie film favourite NEON, Oz Perkins’ Longlegs, is a case in point. The clues were there in its cake-ishly stylised guerrilla marketing. Like the cryptic code left by its titular villain (played by a reinvented Nicolas Cage), the film’s TikTok-friendly teaser-length trailer, for instance, gave away little, created buzz and promised, crucially, “vibes” (including a recurrent pig-squealing motif not featured in the film itself, tellingly). Or, its gimmicky interactive billboard marketing that encouraged the public to dial a number and hear pre-recorded sound bites of Longlegs himself. As with Barbie, a film whose marketing budget surpassed that of the overall film itself, it’s the vibes that count.

In Longlegs’ full-length trailer, unsurprisingly we’re afforded only a surface-level scoop of the synopsis before meaning quickly descends into dizzying chaos. By chaos, think unconventional jump-scares, guttural, bassy motifs and frenzied violence any fan of the post-horror genre, with its psychological leanings, can expect to see. Amongst the chaos, we do learn, however, that FBI agent Lee Harker (played by taciturn scream queen Maika Monroe) is a woman, when a little girl rather pointedly asks Harker at the beginning of the trailer whether it’s “scary being an FBI lady”. We also learn, thanks to transitional cuts that show Longlegs and Harker engaged in similar activities (working at a desk; screaming with rage behind the steering wheel), that we can expect to see the pair juxtaposed in some way.

It transpires that said little girl is in fact the daughter of Harker’s superior, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), with whom she’s tasked in finding the murderer killing whole families — seemingly without touching them or entering the house — and leaving behind coded, Zodiac killer-style letters signed off with the mysterious moniker of Longlegs. Cracking Longlegs’ code owing to her religious upbringing and an innate sixth sense she seems to possess (at the beginning of the film, she correctly identifies a perpetrator’s home on a street full of houses during a stake-out, apparently through instinct alone), Harker deciphers a pattern in his behaviour. However, this isn’t before learning that she holds a personal connection with Longlegs himself, a discovery prompted by a trip home to her mentally unstable hoarder of a mother.

What initially disappoints is what eventually signals Longlegs’ failure: the film isn’t about how “scary it is being an “FBI lady” working the case in an America haunted by ‘60s/‘70s-style misogynistic cult killings; nor is it an intelligent, subversive look how an FBI agents (and by extension, we) function in society might mirror the killer’s itself. Such details echo too closely Jonathan Demme’s inimitable sleeper-hit The Silence of The Lambs(1991), in which heroine FBI agent Clarice Starling, through her approximation with renowned serial killer Hannibal Lector, finds she must square up to her childhood trauma by stepping close to the glass of her past.

Perhaps trying to distinguish itself, Longlegs aims higher by attempting to comment on “accepted” male authority figures. Large, conspicuous portraits of presidents Nixon and Clinton, for example, adorn FBI office walls and homes (whilst also distinguishing flashbacks from the present). Their presence, like the large crucifixes hanging from the walls of domestic spaces, point to the cult of personality that enshrines those supposedly in power. Similarly, the film’s use of girl dolls — mysterious entities somehow linked to Longlegs that crop up repeatedly — serve as symbols of consumer culture, hinting at contemporary fears around our trust in AI technology in the home and Silicone Valley-steered powers of manipulation. The cleverest and most sinister antagonist within the movie, the doll(s) must nonetheless compete with the presence of Longlegs himself and the recurrent silhouettes of the horned Devil he allegedly works for. This is too many cooks, and the message, if there was one, is lost in translation.

To its credit, the film’s painstakingly hypnotic visuals — atmospheric, oppressive mid-century interiors and picture-perfect cinematography worthy of Edward Hopper — are worth a mention. Strong performances likewise compel us to watch, and there’s genuine chemistry between the subdued introvert Harker and the outspoken, overly familiar Agent Carter. Alicia Witt is versatile in the role of Lee’s religious-fanatic, paranoiac hoarder mother, Ruth, while a short but engrossing cameo from Kiernan Shipka (Madmen and Netflix’s Sabrina) as Longlegs’ only known survivor, now residing in a mental asylum, especially stands out. As for Cage, he’s magnetic as the deranged, Satan-worshipping Longlegs, treading the fine lines between deranged, sinister and comical in a way that might just succeed in resuscitating an infamously tired celebrity image.

And yet, Cage’s supposedly Marc Bolan-styled characterisation quickly feels superficial and, eventually, plain gratuitous, failing to live up to the pig-squealing hype promised by the film’s trailer. Though captivating, there’s a discernible hollowness to these “character” performances that speaks to the pointlessness of Longlegs itself. This is largely thanks to their being plucked from the trusty dumpster of Hollywood social stereotypes: asylum-residing lunatics, religious nuts who speak in riddle, and paedophile-adjacent, queer-coded psycho-villains that like to play dress-up (interestingly, the film has been accused of transphobia owing to its portrayal of Longlegs, like The Silence of the Lambs was in its depiction of Buffalo Bill in its day). Problematic or not, it seems there’s nothing creepier than bat-shit women and campy, effeminate men who, it would seem, wear make-up and undergo cosmetic procedures. Over-stylisation can only mask for so long the fact that such characterisations are tired, offensive ways of ramping up the entertainment factor.

If the aim here was to create the impression of saying a lot without really saying a lot, it passed with flying colours. Tricks were missed, not least exploring the origins of Harker’s trauma-born sixth sense and how it perhaps connects with Longlegs, while the anticlimactic and premature cracking of Longlegs’ killer code reveals the film’s use of semiotics, like other tropes in the film, to be what it is: utterly halfcocked.

Beneath it all, this movie maybe wanted to say something, and was primed to raise pertinent questions about how power isn’t top-down, but bottom-up, how the “man downstairs” — the boogieman, the devil, the thing beneath our bed — wields his long legs to control society. So suffocated by its own aesthetic, however, and so noncommittal, it simply can’t. Longlegs is a victim of the superficiality that stalks much of today’s filmmaking, namely, that of stepping too close to the glass and loving its reflection.

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This article was first published in Counter Arts on 20 September 2024