comrade_yui’s review published on Letterboxd:
thank god, a film with visual expansiveness! perkins just gets how to frame this stuff, which already puts him twelve fathoms ahead of the competition -- the ultra wide angle lens allows us, like in welles or wojciech has, to experience the seeing of too-much-seeing, the cavernous warp of perception which makes your eyes veer away from these dead-center compositions and towards the edges of the screen -- and as in mizoguchi, the center of the frame matters less than the sky above the center, so even as perkins puts us in the depths of hell, we're asked to acknowledge the heavens. these are the spatial-spiritual coordinates of longlegs, a directionality that wants us to see the higher cause in the low-down dread, so we have a thriller that already supersedes any deference to its genre predecessors.
it cannot be missed that this is more-or-less a direct parody of the A24/ari aster bullshit paradigm -- those films are crushingly misanthropic and myopic, denying any sort of actual supernaturalist connection between humanity and the non-human that hasn't already been psychologized into the catch-all therapized lingo, millennial infantilism or tryhard true-crime podcasterism -- in short, everything that is banal and soul-draining in the contemporary horror scene.
contrary to this, longlegs, and perkins, actually put stock into the occult resonances that intersect our lives in a way that isn't neatly segmented into some abstract 'other' -- the solution to the mystery here is inextricable from the patterns which the film orients into the compositions, so really perkins reveals everything to you in the opening scene, he doesn't play into the plague of hitchcockism which has infected hollywood like a verminous cancer since the 1960s. whereas the 'elevated horror' paradigm reduces the paranormal to the psychological, oz perkins elevates the personal to the synchro-mystical.
every element here is charged with meaning through the infernalist 'stacked-deck' arrangement of the images, the prose-poem dialogue, and the rising/falling musical pitch of the performances -- "i know you're not afraid of a little bit of the dark, because you ARE the dark" -- monroe's bressonian detective, who has psychic visions, brought into the battlefield with cage's satanic theatrics -- one side of this story is the unknown within the self, the other is the unknown within the surfaces of the world, both of which collude to form the supernaturalist understanding.
perkins, knowing the legacy of his father, rejects the secular mythos around serial killers by placing it within a greater context -- hitchcock's psycho turns murder into a herky-jerk theme park ride where the viewer's psyche is demolished by psychoanalytic cliches literally lectured at the audience. longlegs operates purely on intuition, resonances, synchronicity, and actual ritualism: it has everything that has been rejected by the master-narrative of the american cinema, which has rather glutted itself on empty surrealist spiels or oppressively glum euro-nihilism.
and if the director shares our obsession with symmetry, he makes it a fearful symmetry, a map of tiger's stripes where X does actually mark the spot, where the treasure chest hasn't been emptied, where the sign in nature has a correspondence within a qabalistic system, where evil does exist in that which makes the choice to deny personal empathy and agency -- the left-hand path described by aleister crowley, the black lodge which is not somewhere 'out there', but is right here, in your hands, as we speak thus.
what perkins gets about the occult is that it's the navigation of inner-space using the image of archetype. if you surrender your image to someone else, you do actually lose something, the image is never 'only' an image, it is a surplus of implication and connection; not eliot's wasteland, but machen's hieroglyphics. so you can stop the killing, but you can't erase the void left by it: evil, like dark matter, invisibly deforms everything it touches. if we don't accept that the image has this invisible double, we remain like dolls who don't know the names of our makers -- the hollywood noir tradition has always been about trying to carve personal purpose out of the noise of the universe, which necessitates a faith to succeed, making the ending of this film a three-way deal between the earth, the woman, and the devil: like in the blackcoat's daughter, we part with the film on equal terms, and perkins respects us enough to marinate in our own emotional reactions -- this of course leads to polarization, and that is the signal that we have a winner here, closer to manhunter's daring immanence, not just another disposable product of the assembly line.
"this is a cruel world, especially for the little things" -- if anything, this movie is a victory for the little things winning against the larger abstractions. but are we willing to admit how dryly funny longlegs is? how nic cage's sing-songy killer makes fun of hollywood's reliance on needledrops and nostalgia to communicate personality/'cool'? how this condemns the FBI/law enforcement for exploiting and then denying the 'aura' of serial killers, which they themselves participate in creating to justify their own existence as institutions? and what of the fact that this is not an intellectualized cinema, not a work which gives a shit about 'plot holes' or conventionality, but which dithers and serenades like a satisfying nightmare?
perkins directs films which work on a moment-to-moment basis, which is to say he's a craftsman of mid-century caliber with a perverse eye for slaughtering the sacred cows of cinema. his gutsy superstitions guide his camera towards the truth: serial murder is a symptom of a culture in which nothing is allowed to be sacred except for the spectacle of pathological violence. the victims are made complicit by the media, the audience shamelessly fetishizes 'the other' (silence of the lambs), the cops get an easy boogeyman to blame, and companies get millions of dollars in profit from the suffering of the vulnerable, which is to say, the suffering of the underclasses and marginalized.
longlegs shows how these stories should responsibly be told: cut the sensationalist crap and admit that the 'individuated' violence of these killers is foundational to the surplus-value of surburbia as well as the misogynistic cycle which forces women to sacrifice everything for the smallest of gains. nic cage's madman is no different from the USA's long and storied history of demagogues, patriarchs and cult-leaders -- the only difference is that he kneels to the demonic, instead of the dollar.
"he worships the devil, that's for sure -- but he's allowed to do that in the united states of america."
