Longlegs
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Review by PlainviewPics Pro

Longlegs 2024

★★★

Watched 25 Oct 2024

It is hard to argue against Longlegs’s suspense-generating merits. The film’s paranoid, puzzle-y, supernatural, psychic-powers-are-real world evokes persistent menace. Perkins’s images build a maze for the audience to lose themselves inside. When light pours through two windows, it cuts to two flashlight beams occupying the same space in the frame. Or a dissolve from Harker to a tree similarly positioned in the ensuing composition. These dense pictorial schemes are a semiotic Rube Goldberg device. Longlegs is a sinister codex of fading devils, symbology, and numerology. The viewer leans in, analyzes, and tries to decipher the hidden messages.

Though some of the tension seems phoney and manufactured. Perkins knows how to utilize negative space in that empty, darkened house. You’re peeking at the corners in fear. But stop and think for a second. Why would an FBI agent live in such an isolated, exposed space? Where everyone can see in, but she can’t see anything? You’re begging to die by home invasion! At least get some blinds, for God’s sake! Isn’t Harker law enforcement? How is she so clueless when it comes to personal security?????

I digress. The story follows its premise to a logical conclusion. No matter how ridiculous. Longlegs is not ashamed of its genre. It feels no need to wear other prestigious, “elevated” clothing. It’s a formally rigorous scare machine that has a total commitment to its conspiracy-brained Satanic universe. The devil is real. Hail Perkins.

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