A young FBI agent (Maika Monroe) is on the trail of a mysterious figure known as Longlegs.
She has no idea who this person is - just that it is a name on a series of notes left at a series of murder-suicides.
As she draws closer to the truth, the investigator finds herself unravelling the mysteries of her own past.
I have never seen any of Osgood Perkins’ previous movies.
I remember some film critic on a podcast I cannot remember bringing up his work - and because of his lineage - I caught his name coming up on new projects, and this one was the first of his films I could see.
My first observation about the film is that it is set in a pre-internet age - starts in the Seventies, with most of the contemporary action taking place in the mid-nineties.
I have to put this down to the film’s increasingly religious and supernatural bent. It deprives the characters and the viewer of an easy out.
The film ratchets up the tension, and becomes increasingly surreal as the film moves from being a straightforward(ish) thriller to something untethered from empiricism and tangible reality.
I was exhausted watching it and I think I might have dozed midway as our heroine is searching through her belongings - I know it was this scene because when she finds the information she was looking for I jumped fully awake.
Consider this a review with a footnote.
There is some wonderful imagery - Alicia Witt’s reappearance through the car rear window, and then appearing to float up to the front window.
The ending felt underwhelming - simultaneously not definitive and not ambiguous enough to remain unnerving.
I did not have time to digest the movie because my phone went off with news about the assassination attempt on Trump.
Longlegs went on the backburner. Who cares about satanism when real life fascism is working its real magic?
A few weeks later, the film still lingers.
Opening within a limited 1:1 frame, the film immediately shows its credentials as a thriller (the filmmaker’s control of what you can see and when) and one of the film’s underlying themes: the limits of perception and experience, and the effect of time on memory.
That frame-with-a-frame and the way story information is shown or withheld immediately creates a tension that the film maintains throughout.
What is impressive is that the film’s revelations only add to the tension and create more questions.
Longlegs himself remains a powerful figure on and offscreen.
The plot vaguely follows the form of a mystery - but it never loses that foreboding, that almost cosmic level of dread. The fact that film takes place in the mid-nineties, before the internet replaced the unknown with TMI, feels especially pertinent to the film’s particular brand of uncanny hijinks.
It might have taken a few days, but the movie is sticking with me. I am keen to watch it again - and check out Perkins’ other directorial efforts.
