🎃🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈♾️ Nic (Nicholas / Nicola) ♾️🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🎃’s review published on Letterboxd:
"I know you're not afraid of a little dark. Because you are the dark."
Evil has always existed in life. It exists in many forms, throughout the world and around us. Because we witness evil in various ways, it's easy to become used to it, but there's always something about it that remains unshakably terrifying. Especially in how inevitable it is.
To make things clear, this is my way of saying that Longlegs feels familiar. But Osgood Perkins does something unique with his material. Not only is he interested in examining suburban evil in its purest form but he lets it manifest through his formal filmmaking. With his distinctive talent of crafting unsettling atmospheres, evil permeates through every shot, emphasising the psychological dread and desolation of his environments. It almost feels like we're watching something we shouldn't be, and yet we continue to do so, just to see how Longlegs unfolds its calculated mystery, utilising fear of the unknown to heighten our paranoia. He borrows from the many pulpy crime horror-thriller and police procedural influences surrounding him (Cure, The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, etc.), but fuses them with the occult horror elements of his previous works to craft Longlegs's unique identity, leading to a compelling pay-off and a genuinely terrifying third act. Maybe the answers feel over-explained with a particular exposition dump, but it doesn't diminish the utterly chilling impact left behinnd.
The horror doesn't just lie in what the answers are (or what we don't know) and in Nicolas Cage's unrecognisable performance, whose unsettling veneer keeps you in suspense, but the horror lies in how willing we are to look further and to discover the rotting core of evil, much like Maika Monroe's character. Even though we shouldn't, we go down the depths of Hell, disguised by the Earth we walk on, as we remain compelled by our curiosity to know the answers. Once we willingly bear witness, we can't go back, for evil has not been around us but *within* us. And such a terrible horror fuels operates throughout and then reveals itself in Longlegs, all building up to Perkins's best film to date.
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