Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 15 (Longlegs)

Oh, we're really dwindling down to it now. Halloween approaches, and I can feel it in the air. Those last gasps of summer that you feel during the end of September and into the beginning of October are all gone now. The crisp cold of fall has arrived, and it's only going to get colder from here. There's an obvious tradition here on the spooky marathon for Halloween itself, and so in a sense this is our last exploration. Certainly, it's the last film I've never seen before that we're doing for this one. What do we have here today, then? Longlegs is a film I knew nothing about going in, save for one tiny bit of osmosis. Thanks to my pal Sean (you'll be getting your other comic book post tomorrow, friendo) I had it in my head that this resembled Twin Peaks in a fashion. It does, but it does it with its own flourish and style completely different from David Lynch and Mark Frost do it. That's not unwelcome, however, and I found this film growing on me.

Longlegs is Silence Of The Lambs meeting Twin Peaks. Yeah, it's FBI agents going after a scary murderer man, the titular Longlegs (who my other pal Joe described as a cross between Heath Ledger's Joker and Buffalo Bill) and our protagonist is a lady FBI agent, like in Silence. Another way to put it is that Longlegs is Twin Peaks if Laura Palmer was also Dale Cooper. There's a whole bunch of shit to unpack with that statement in another paragraph or so, and we will. I just want to take my time, because the movie does also. I have a pet list of descriptors I like to use for movies like this. Stuff like "a slow burn" or "luxurious in its pacing". Longlegs is those things, somehow, despite only being 100 minutes long. I had to get up from my comfy couch with the blankets halfway into the movie because I was falling asleep, and I say this as a compliment. Like with Solaris. There's something about the way the movie takes its time with itself that impressed me. There's a real mystery at play here over how Longlegs manages to do the terrible things he does, and it kept me guessing until the third act. I really liked playing in that strange sense of ambiguity, and like Laura Palmer before her, Agent Lee Harker is innately tied to the horror and doing her best to keep her head above water and her soul in the light.

That's the rub. If this is Twin Peaks and Lee Harker is Laura Palmer, Longlegs is clearly Bob. A malevolent long-haired monster of a man (played near-unrecognizably by Nicolas Cage) who spreads an influence of evil and compels the average American father to commit murders against their own families. Now, Bob represents a lot of things in Twin Peaks, but let's just go with our old standby and define him as the Dark Heart Of America for now, the terrible lurking secret behind the domestic American family unit. He's also a force of evil personified, and Longlegs has a little of that as well. The film is playing with satanic powers, and the third act twist of exactly who is helping Longlegs with these killings plays into that well. It is both a literal and metaphorical deal with the devil, and dark powers are being tapped in order to corrupt these men into doing these things. In this regard, despite reading the movie under the same lens as Twin Peaks, I wish it went more with that aesthetic. Namely, I wish they didn't clearly explain everything about how Longlegs and his accomplice did it. Okay, maybe they don't explain everything, but enough of it is wrapped up in that third act explanation that I feel like I've been given the answer instead of solving it in my own way, as I did with Twin Peaks. It's a minor quibble, though. This was an excellent little motion picture, using metaphor and literal interpretation to tell a story that boils down to "the devil made me do it". You can reduce Bob down to that, too, if you like, but there's a lot more going on with Bob than with Longlegs. Nevertheless, an excellent film and one that's worth checking out.

And so we draw to the final curtain. Halloween is almost here. One more post, y'all, and then we get to put the spooky season behind us. Will it be a banger of a movie, or a disappointment? One way or another, I will have an opinion on something. Get your finest costume ready and go out for some candy. Next time, the finale.