The highest compliment I can pay Longlegs right out the gate is that I'd like to see it again soon. That hasn't been the case for a lot of recent horror.

On the whole, this plays like a lost and abridged season of True Detective, which might sound like a covert way of saying I wanted more exposition of the sort the miniseries format might be able to supply, but truly, it isn't. Rather, I'm making the point that Longlegs traffics in a specific category of cosmic unease that, thanks to the prominent narrative role of dolls and the anti-levity of Cage's most nakedly kabuki-inspired performance in years, might make it the most Ligottian thing to get a wide release since The Empty Man, and Rust Cohle before that.

I can’t pretend the "Satanic" stuff doesn't seriously threaten to derail the whole enterprise, nor am I surprised that it does just that for a lot of folks for whom its treatment here--self-serious but silly until all of a sudden it isn't...until all of a sudden it is again?--is a bridge too far, especially for a movie that otherwise seems to have no trouble committing to ultra-stylized ultra-darkness (of the True Detective variety, once again). The incorporation of classically "Satanic" stuff isn't new to Oz Perkins or anyone who's seen The Blackcoat's Daughter; but where this movie's creative predecessor seemed very earnest in its depiction of devil-worship, I think there's been a subtle but significant shift in the tone of the "Satanic" in Perkins's cinematic worlds that most closely resembles the "Satanic" of Brian Bertino's (super underrated) The Dark and the Wicked, Aterrados/Terrified, and even The Wailing; all of which, to varying and variously successful degrees, embrace and make use of classically "Satanic" iconography as symbols of antihuman cruelty, of cosmic ill-will without spiritual import or intelligent design.

No one in Longlegs is in control of their actions, much less of their lives or the narratives thereof. Gibbering absurdity is the only "Satan" here, a nameless and malignant senselessness that pervades the film from start to finish. Harker couldn't possibly have forgotten her encounter with Longlegs even if she was a child at the time; it's telegraphed a good half-hour before the reveal that Harker's mother is Longlegs' accomplice. Rather than undermining the movie, these and other dissonant notes suffuse the film with a nightmarish air of doom, an evil predetermination, a hopeless inevitability: no one is in control of their actions, no one is in control of their lives. Whether you give it up to God or to something else or to nothing, you are not in control. So it could be anyone.

Tl;dr--the American answer to Cure??