This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Cineanalyst’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
Tripod Legs
The Cameras are the first victims. Consequently, we’re left with tedious slow zoom-ins on little to nothing happening and a digital facsimile of analogue film until the last Camera—”Carrie Anne Camera” (carry a camera, carrying camera) no less—jumps off the roof. Welp, at least somebody got a jump scare out of it.
The writer-director, Osgood Perkins, son of the “Psycho” himself, is upfront about “Longlegs” being a straight-up “Silence of the Lambs” (1991) pastiche. But, with the addition of stupid satanic supernaturalism. Lots of "Zodiac" coded language and numerology to lend a semblance of something interesting going on under the superficiality of the surface. I’m afraid there’s nothing there, though. Just lots of Maika Monroe doing her best Jodie Foster impersonation, running into danger with her firearm pulled out. Nic Cage is even worse as a Buffalo Bill copy, which is to say a copy of a copy of Norman Bates. Hence, the hint of transvestism, in addition to the pedophilic interest in little girls.
So, a family of “cameras,” a detective protagonist who is the investigating camera (she snaps the polaroid), and dolls (dollmaker as filmmaker, perhaps) that are doubles, alluding to the doubling nature of the cinematographic apparatus. Problem is Harker Lee is named after the wrong Lee. That is, her name alludes to the Harker character in Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula,” plus Dracula himself in Christopher Lee. Perkins, however, should’ve been thinking Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Psycho victim Janet Leigh, and as in the most successful twist on the invention of slasher horror by “Psycho” (1960) in film history, “Halloween” (1978). (Too bad John Carpenter didn’t get his first choice of either Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing for the detective role.) “Dracula” as Satanism is a weak reading of the classic tale, anyways.
In “Psycho” and “Halloween,” the camera is associated with the monster ("Peeping Tom" (1960) blatantly so). Note the peeping Tom scene in the former, and the mask in the latter associating him with the unseen camera and spectator. Both are defeated when they’re reflexively exposed for what they are, the monster as movie. Heck, ditto “The Silence of the Lambs;” after all, who wears a face mask, and who wears the night-vision goggles? It’s not Jodie Foster, just as it wasn’t Jamie Lee Curtis, nor Janet Leigh.
Initially, with the voyeur from the car pulling up to the house, it seemed as though “Longlegs” got this, but, no, it screws it up. It still tries to conceal Cage’s eponymous monster as if he’s the camera, but the movie instead tries to associate the final girl with it. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. It’s what was behind and the key to the success of the jump scare, too. Most horror filmmakers don’t get that, and that’s why most horror movies are dull. This Perkins doesn’t get it, either, and “Longlegs” is consequently also dull. At least he's closing in, but the case remains unsolved.
Anyways, enough of today’s dumb movies; time to spend the rest of the week viewing the online portion of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.
