In the Flesh: Longlegs

On a fundamental level, I think if you make a movie in which the Devil is real you should probably be able to conceive of more spectacular acts of evil than nuclear family murder/suicide. It’s clear director Osgood Perkins has some thoughts about the emptiness and malice of his suburban setting, but as in his previous I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, there’s neither a thesis nor a strong enough vibe to make it feel like much of anything. There are some great isolated images. The empty house full of fluttering plastic sheets is a chilling sight, as are the black-veiled dolls with their slitted, catlike eyes that sit at the center of the film’s uninspired Satanic narrative. Longlegs does a lot of conscious evocation of The Silence of the Lambs, from its indifferent material about special agent Lee Harker’s (Maika Monroe) difficulties as a woman in law enforcement to its nebulous preoccupation with the objectification of young girls and the co-opting of femininity, but it’s an invitation for a comparison that can only be unflattering to Perkins’ soulless work.

Nicolas Cage is magnetic in the role of the titular killer, body dysmorphic dollmaker Dale Cobble, his natural flair for extremes only enhanced by the disturbing facial prosthetics he wears to simulate repeatedly botched cosmetic surgery. The crackling vibrancy of his acting, though, only serves to draw attention to the thematic hollowness of the character and the film around him. The villains of Longlegs are hoarders and effeminate plastic surgery addicts, social deviants lashing out at the mainstream to placate a faceless force of malice. Aside from Lambs, Perkins’ other obvious touchstone here is the work of David Lynch, a director whose knack for making Good and Evil feel immediate and personal within the particular visual and moral framework of suburbia has made him a canonical figure in American film. Perkins has no such knack. Suburbia is empty. The people who prey on its herds are crazies and sickos. Satan presides over mundane cruelties for his own inscrutable reasons, without apparent emotion or personal interest. 

Into this tired and ill-fitting aesthetic skin Perkins pours immaculately framed images lifted more or less wholesale from Fincher’s crime flicks, inviting yet another unflattering comparison. I don’t think much of Fincher’s work outside of Alien 3, but I can’t deny he has a clinical detachment that Perkins clearly wants to emulate but can’t quite conjure, landing instead somewhere in vaguely dissociative aimlessness. Not Blair Underwood’s really sharp supporting turn as Lee’s boss at the FBI or Alicia Witt’s as her mentally ill mother, a formidable performance even hamstrung by limp writing, can salvage this turkey. In short, Longlegs is a mess and far less than the sum of its parts. Some pretty shots. Some good acting. But what’s it trying to say to us that The Silence of the Lambs and Twin Peaks didn’t say first and orders of magnitude better? Nothing worth listening to.