Boy, the FBI will let in just anyone, huh?

First impressions... Good, but overhyped to the gills. I worship Satin, though.

Way way way too many questions that are, well, questionable (spoiler - you're a seasoned FBI agent who has information about how a killer goes by a birthdate of daughters... and your daughter has the birthday and you just don't... leave?) Vibes are always in abundance as the control of the frame and (lack of) light and tension is palpable, if nothing else by the off kilter camera choices. On the other hand, vibes not maketh a great film - characters do that, and this has one gaping hole I will get to momentarily.

Second impressions: It was good to step a little back from the film to realize that this is one of the masterful sizzles of the year on a steak that goes down and you can chew well, but a little too hollow a cut of meat. It's not that Perkins hasn't thought through what the ideas in the Longlegs mythology and procedural are all about, it's that when it's stripped down to the logic portion, when you go further into that proverbial basement of this, you're left wanting more, not in explanations exactly but just in seeing a little more... well, humanity.

This is where I come back to the Longlegs/Cobel (sic and sick name, bro) character, who is a Movie Character that doesn't gel into the rest of the world this is set in. In one of the better (if brief) scenes in the film, we see Longlegs go to a general store and has an awkward interaction with the young girl clerk (and you can't blame her when he goes around like *that*), and in the car moments later he flips out for several seconds and repeats her asking her dad to come because the creepy guy is at the counter again.

I wish there was more of that in the film, and Perkins either shouldn't have had it in the story if he wasn't going to do more with Longlegs than the extreme compositional and formal teases, or leaned into this idea of... how does this Satanic Doll Master operate in the world? How does he do his fucking taxes? The comparisons of course are made to Silence of the Lambs (by, well, throw a rock online I'm sure something will come up), but Longlegs comes out poor by comparison.

While Perkins and Maika Monroe do a very compelling job of making her character formidable and holding in a lifetime of unacknowledged trauma (how much is one of those open questions that bothers me still), you don't get to see, or the movie just isn't interested in, understanding Longlegs like a Buffalo Bill, who despite being an evil SOB is given some bizarre but revelatory scenes (ie Goodbye Horses) that humanized him, or even (to invoke a Perkins forefather) Norman Bates. They came across like complex, harrowingly fucked up people, while Longlegs, while never not entertaining via Cage, is a capital A Affected creation that only exists in a fictional narrative, tooled over in the make up as much as the Elephant Man.

I think I'm caught somewhere in the middle of those who love this and hate it. The film has performances that, Cage aside, help to keep a grounding and vitality that is needed, and Blair Underwood and a near unrecognizable Kiera Shipka are key to that. I was on board with the direction and atmosphere of this - if nothing else because that is what this has in spades - and I don't even have a problem with the sort of twist reveal about this FBI agent's cuckoo mother (even though... you never got a hint of it, all those years, even with some sort of amnesia? Shrug).

If you asked me just outright do I recommend it (and depending on the sort of film fan I'm talking to, of course, as in do you like *these* kind of almost throwback fucked up serial killer horror 90s joints), then yes. Where I'm a little, no much, less satisfied is that the filmmaker is so immersed in the Darkness of his world that he didn't reckon with some of the story beats and choices being goofy as shit and still with the stone coldest of faces. Moreover, it drops the vigor and rigor of a procedural to become a Bad Nun saga.

After all, given what this boils down to story wise, isn't this substantively an extended Are You Afraid of the Dark episode, or more charitable X Files (I noticed only after the fact Twin Peaks in mentions and this is way too mannered for that). And maybe we could be done with this a little quicker and with commercials? It has intense moves and compelling acting, and looking under the hood it's like... Satan, what else you got in those circles you love so much?

PS: come on Perkins, tell me where T-Rex hurt you?