🌟 Leighton Trent 🎄’s review published on Letterboxd:
“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”
― Tennessee Williams, 'The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore'
Longlegs is exactly like being stuck in a house afire and all any viewer can do is watch the black flames burn around them from out the upstairs window. And the house just continues to burn and burn and burn.
This kind of evil isn't direct; it permeates slowly but surely, the subcutaneous first and then eventually the subconscious. The careful brilliance with which Osgood Perkins handles such a story is that I was left thinking after it ended, "Oh this is not as scary as I thought it was going to be", yet the film visited me in my dreams last night after my viewing with Longlegs' caked face right in front of mine, his unhinged mouth attempting to swallow me whole. The liminal space between the reality of watching a movie and the way it can affect you afterward is something I don't often think about. I won't make that mistake again after this film.
It is all about perception. The warpedness of it. The dead-center compositions. The off-kilter ones. Our eyes are stuck. Our eyes weave here, there and everywhere at the edges of the screen for what we believe will terrify us, but what we don't realize is it's already there, beneath us, down the stairs... Perkins clobbers us over and over again with tenebrous visuals, claustrophobic soundscapes and aspect ratios before he descends down the rabbit hole right along side us inside of a David Lynch-like absurdist, surrealistic, insidious vision of what he feels a modern horror film should be.
Horror isn't back. It's been here all along. Waiting downstairs. Waiting just for you. So, accept the gift and say your prayers already.
*winks* "Hail Satan" 💋
**Also, per IMDb Trivia:
"Nicolas Cage and Oz Perkins made the movie as a tribute to their mothers."
Do with this information what you will...
"'Come in', he says, and I feel his voice
breathing from the opening.
The exit is through Satan’s mouth.
Come in my mouth, he says, you’re there
already, and the huge hinge
begins to close.
[...]
Satan sucks himself out the keyhole.
I’m left locked in the box, he seals
the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue.
'It’s your coffin now', Satan says."― Sarah Olds, 'Satan Says'
