No Evil Angel

"Love is familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love."--William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost, Act I, Scene II

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Oz Perkins's new film, Longlegs (2024) is on brand for the director. It's a film that's chock full of enigmatic and alarming images and an airless and oppressive mood. It finds the director moving away from the kinds of aimless but atmospheric films of his early career and toward more conventional idioms. Part of this is the structure of the serial killer procedural, which imposes on Perkins an actual plot whether he likes it or not (I rather think he does not). Part of it might be maturity. In any event, it's the first of the director's movies that invites comparisons to other films. You may hear it compared to The Silence of the Lambs or Seven, but Perkins has too singular a vision to allow any such comparisons to gain any traction. Whatever his influences may be, he has completely subsumed them into his own cinematic anima.

The story here follows the hunt for the serial killer, Longlegs, who murders families. Longlegs leaves no trace of his presence at the scenes of his crimes--the crimes appear to have been committed by the father of the family in each case--except for a coded letter at each massacre. Each family has a daughter with a birthday on the fourteenth of a month. New to the investigation is Agent Lee Harker. We meet her when her supervisor, Carter, is doling out assignments. She and her assigned partner are assigned boring legwork, to visit neighbors who might be witnesses. Lee intuits that one of the houses in their assigned neighborhood is a crime scene. Her partner doesn't take her seriously, which gets him killed. Lee is examined for latent ESP, and she scores as mildly psychic. She feels things at the crime scenes that lead her to more progress on the case than in the previous twenty years it has been active. Unfortunately, Longlegs is aware of her. He leaves her a birthday card at her house and provides the means of decoding it. Lee was also born on the fourteenth. Lee work leads her and her boss, Carter, back to the site of the first crime, where they find an exquisitely made life-sized doll in the form of Carrie Anne Camera, the girl who escaped the crime. That girl is now in a mental institution, catatonic for years before waking up on the day the agents uncovered the doll. The doll's head contains a metallic orb that causes Lee to have violent psychic flashes when the forensic tech hits it and causes it to chime. Lee's mother is concerned about her and demands that Lee come home for her birthday. While visiting her mother, she unearths a stash of old Polaroids that suggest that Lee might have met Longlegs when she was a child. She has his picture, enabling the FBI to apprehend him. But Longlegs isn't done by any stretch of the imagination. He has his great work on behalf of his Satanic master. And, apparently, he has an accomplice...

As I say, this is a mood piece. This is a film that has a wintery "shot in Canada in 1982" feeling to it. It's set in 1975 and the mid-nineties, so it's splitting the difference some. Perkins favors relatively long takes and his modus operandi uses these shots much like some of the Japanese horror directors did in the early aughts. His shot compositions encourage the viewer to watch the negative spaces, particularly in shots where the director has provided spaces for evil things to lurk if you wait long enough to see them. This mostly works with this film because of a sequence early where our heroine goes home, is lured outside, and Longlegs appears behind her in her own house. This is the equivalent of The Pale Brown Thing in Fritz Leiber's story of the same name (recycled in Our Lady of Darkness), or multiple scenes in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's horror movies. Indeed, the motif of people committing violent acts at the behest of some controlling outside intelligence is reminiscent of Kurosawa's Cure. In any event, this sequence teaches the audience to look in the corners of the frame or behind the level of the characters in the foreground. This is an effective technique for inducing anxiety into an audience, by edging them with the promise of a scare that's delayed and delayed. In other ways, this is a very conventional narrative. In its broad outlines, this film has the same plot as The Dark Knight, in which the villain allows himself to be captured in order to fulfill a broader agenda. The film telegraphs its endgame in a scene early in the film when Lee visits her boss's family and agrees to come to their daughter's birthday. Is this Hitchcock's time bomb under the table? Maybe. Probably. The audience doesn't have to be too keyed into the film to recognize where the plot is going to end up. It would have been a surprise if these scenes had no bearing on the end at all, but there aren't enough characters in the film to be indulging them on red herrings. That's a luxury on which this film doesn't have the resources to spend. Its use of creepy dolls and a droning ambient sound design are more overtly borrowed from the horror movie toolbox at no additional cost to the narrative.

Perkins doesn't entirely rely on his formal techniques, though. His earlier work sometimes promised more than he could deliver, but he manages to live up the awful things he suggests here because of a game cast. The weird, profoundly disturbing performance from Nicolas Cage ensures that. He's some demented amalgam of Buffalo Bill, Immortan Joe, and Tiny Tim (the singer from the late 1960s). There's a certain amount of gender panic built into his appearance here which is distinctly femme-coded even if there's no real evidence that Longlegs is queer or trans. Image outranks text in movies, so this still bothers me a little in ways that (probably) aren't intended by the filmmakers. Perkins IS the son of Anthony Perkins, after all, and his father's most famous role is nothing BUT gender panic. Fortunately, Cage isn't the only sideshow attraction. Both Kiernan Shipka and Alicia Witt provide showy, off kilter, horrifying performances as Carrie Ann Camera (a significant name given how the film occasionally frames its expositional scenes) and Harker's mom, respectively. Shipka's part is barely more than a cameo, but she makes the most of it. She's placed in the film frame like she's trapped in a box, contorted to fit and acting like a feral animal snarling in a snare. Witt's, as Harker's mom, plays a character whose role unfolds and transforms as the film goes on. She starts as a potential target for Longlegs as intimated by his coded birthday card to Lee, but whose role in things darkens as the film goes on. It's her meatiest role on the big screen since Fun back in the nineties.

Maika Monroe couldn't hope to hold the screen against these performances. She's not that kind of actor. Perkins wisely doesn't ask her to do that in the first place. To an extent, Lee Harker is more a point of view than a character. There's a feeling of dissociation in her performance, like she's walking through a nightmare that has made her numb. She cracks a smile exactly once in the entire film (which prompted some wit in the audience when I saw the film to say "Oh, she can smile!"). Even as the film's central mystery becomes more personal to her, she maintains an impassive and deliberately unaffected mask. It would be easy to suggest that her performance is the weak link in the movie, but that's not entirely true. The unfolding revelations of the nature of her relationship with Longlegs suggest a character that has been shaped by trauma. Her mask is that of a survivor. For all that, it's not very expressive, though that's probably what Perkins wanted from her.

If I'm ultimately unsatisfied with this film in spite of its excellent qualities, it's because it relies a bit too much on Satanic panic as its big scary idea. The film is doing unexpectedly big business, perhaps because this idea has more currency among a more religious audience than myself. Me? I don't really like devil movies, or, rather, I'm skeptical of them most of the time. The notion that the devil makes people do bad things is just so much vapor to me. Human beings are quite awful enough without coaching from old Scratch. The question of whether the Devil exists and is directing the events of this story is an open one, but the film's last line of dialogue tends to pick a side. I'm sympathetic to an interpretation that frames this film as a demonic parody of the lengths a fanatical Christian might go to in order to keep a loved one out of hell. This is the pretext Evangelical Christianity gives for persecuting queers and other sinners after all. This might even be the intent of the film. Whatever. The film arguably works better as an exploration of the director's own daddy issues. Perkins has spoken in the past about how his father's secrecy and sexuality were a strain on his family and by framing Longlegs as a genderqueer threat to families, he could be processing horrors passed down from his dad. This interpretation has a different framing available if you're hip to the zeitgeist of contemporary (anti) trans politics and if you accept Longlegs as a genderqueer presence in the film (I do). I don't know if there's an intent to indict transness or gender variance as an existential threat to families, or to suggest that transness is a diabolical effort to colonize the minds of the young, BUT...that interpretation can be fit to this movie. It makes me deeply uncomfortable with it. It makes me sad, because Longlegs is a cunning horror movie that has been lovingly made by people who care about art. But "art" isn't absolution, and this is a cultural timebomb waiting for its seconds to count down.

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