One Thing I Kind of Like About Longlegs

Before I say anything else about Longlegs, I should make it clear that it worked on me. I can tell because my watch was buzzing every 5-10 minutes, warning me that my heart rate had gotten too high. It is extremely creepy, right from the start.

But it’s also bonkers. Near nonsensical. By the last act, it had given in to its goofiness to such a degree that all of its creepiness had evaporated, leaving me to wonder what I really thought of it. (But I still turned the lights on when going upstairs).

There are two highlights: one is an extended sequence where the protagonist is inside her absurdly creepy home alone at night, and she gets her first solid clue to crack the case. There is a ton that doesn’t make sense about the scene. Does she commute every day from DC to a secluded log cabin in the woods? Why does she turn on the outside light and then go out to the dark portion of the house? Why does she immediately go outside? How did an intruder get past her and into her house?

But it still all works in the moment, because it’s filmed not just like a classic suspense movie scene, but like a super-heightened version of one. The house itself is both dark and exposed. The protagonist is small in the frame in a tiny island of light, surrounded by dim spaces around the room where an assailant could suddenly appear, an open doorway to the next room that a killer could jump out of, huge windows just waiting for a face to appear in a jump scare.

The other highlight is the opening scene, a bizarre encounter between a young girl and a stranger, in a small, ViewMaster-like frame that the movie used for flashbacks. Everything is framed weird. The stranger’s car doesn’t get close enough to the house, and the camera never gets close enough for us to see what’s inside it. The girl is completely expressionless, and her mood and even motivation is impenetrable. She looks at trees around the yard, each accompanied with a discordant jump-scare stinger. The stranger is cut off by the top of the frame, until just before you can see their face, which cuts immediately to the opening titles.

It’s all so eerie and unsettling, and it sets the mood perfectly. Why is any of it scary? We don’t know, really, but it must be, because the movie is telling us that it is!

And ultimately, that’s the best thing about Longlegs. I can’t really say that I liked it very much, but I absolutely respect the style of it. It commits so hard to being creepy that you have to appreciate how much it works, even while you’re completely aware that what you’re watching is absurd.

There are a few sequences in the middle that seem deliberately arranged for sustained weirdness, and specifically to let one of the actors show just how fully they’ve committed to the movie. Kiernan Shipka as a girl still under the thrall of some kind of evil. Nicolas Cage as Longlegs (not a spoiler!) freaking out in his car. And it starts with the head of a psychiatric home who is, for some reason, over-the-top flamboyant and careless about the condition of the patients.

After that barrage of performances, I decided that Longlegs is something that I haven’t exactly seen before: a kind of camp horror. Not a horror comedy, not something over-the-top in its gore (it’s actually surprisingly restrained on that front, in fact), not a lazy slasher, and not a parody that’s winking at the audience. Instead, it’s as if they took every aspect that makes Silence of the Lambs work and turned it all up to full volume, while refusing to take any of it that seriously.

Instead of calling it style over substance, maybe it’s more accurate to say that the style is the substance. In any case, I think it’s bullshit, but that doesn’t keep it from being gloriously creepy bullshit.