I was definitely really freaked out several times during Longlegs, but the only time I almost cried was when I realized someone had actually made a movie that kept to 101 minutes. Jesus saves!
Does my gratitude factor into why I'm landing on the higher side of the letter grades I considered? As Longlegs constantly reiterates, who among us knows our own minds? In any case, I've decided not just to forgive all the hooey in this movie (or, at least, in its story) but to accept that the movie knows it's all hooey. In plot terms, it has trouble holding together at the best of times, and the last third or so is certainly not the best of times. This might matter more if I ever see Longlegs again.
But the movie has been bitten by the same, intriguing bug that bit Jane Schoenbrun this year; you could easily call Osgood Perkins's movie I Saw the Devil Glow. Both films stay attached to narrative film templates but genuinely want narrative film to work differently, and not just by, you know, defying linear chronology or oscillating aspect ratios (though both happen here). Sure, I see a lot of Hereditary here and maybe a little Mandy, but Longlegs seems almost as inspired by something like Vampyr: mood, particular edits, and overall montage are doing so much of the storytelling and scarifying work, and the language doesn't feel imitative. There's a high tally of moments I didn't see coming, and which I'm not sure I've ever seen before: the smash cut to the title, the craziest-ever start to an FBI suspect interview, a memorably unsettling version of that scene we've seen eight million times where All the Police Cars Converge on the Baddie at Once. Every episode of bloodspray—not just the structure and timing of killing scenes and the surprise factor of some deaths but the actual spectacle of the Karo syrup or the digital geysers, their arc through the frame, the placement of the camera—felt unfamiliar and shocking. The sound work where some intruder may or may not be outside, or already inside, is plenty unnerving, but so is an effect, used many times, that sounds like an incongruous gust of air has passed beneath a closed door... but it can't be just that.
What I'm saying is, Longlegs had me right where it wanted me for an impressive ratio of its runtime—and once it had me, it kept making choices that risked undoing its ghoulish hold but actually, even surprisingly intensified it. Not always, but more than enough. Plus, that exact kind of black magic, improvement and deepening of interest, via a whole bunch of effects that ought to diminish and render ridiculous, is what Nicolas Cage's titular performance has in spades. I thought he was heroic, and kind of spellbinding... as disturbing as the film needed him to be, but with no clichés or easy choices on the way to getting us there. The voice is indescribably odd. The look is almost so, though if you imagine Beetlejuice crossed with a 200-year-old Linda Tripp, you're getting there. But the rhythm, the volume, the aura, the energy are all Cage, and all mesmerizing, though I'm sure people will fight.
And as for the obvious criticism that it's impossible to imagine a guy this weird eluding police or escaping general notice in this smallish rural town....well, how many villains have you noticed in the world recently whose villainy is anything but hidden, and yet we find ways to rationalize or minimize it. There's a midfilm scene in a general store designed to make this point unambiguously. A line from that scene, "Dad, that weird old guy is here again," could be the slogan of a major political party right now. So yep, I'm fine with a story this summer about out-in-the-open diabolism that isn't even bothering to hide itself, and which we may or may not succeed in vanquishing, even once we've clearly named the problem. B
P.S.: May I just say, I hate these dine-in movie theaters. Longlegs did not benefit from having the lights halfway up so that people could get the tater tots and milkshakes they'd demanded from their bed-like seats. The whole environment has become about constant, obsequious service to the filmgoer. We're the lords of the screening space, when I think going to the cinema should involve the audience checking our egos and submitting to a film.
