Serendipitous timing on this film's release considering I'd just had an awesome experience catching Silence of the Lambs on the big screen recently, and even more crazy is that, unbeknownst to me, Osgood Perkins listened to my post-screening convo with a bud and in record time created a film where every decision was specifically in opposition to everything I admired in Lambs.

- Silence of the Lambs is a film with such a deep feeling for the life teeming both around and through the central characters, whereas Longlegs is a cold, lifeless film where no character is allotted a backstory or personality beyond the barest essentials of plot relevance. Consider the scene in Lambs where Clarice first enters the police station and it's teeming with people and day-to-day operations, versus the void, empty office where Lee and Carter first start exploring the case. Consider the conversations between Hannibal and Clarice, filled with suggestions of their lives beyond the specific confines of the Buffalo Bill investigation, versus any conversation in Longlegs which is entirely confined to this one specific plot apparatus (save for the one detail of Carter holding on to her daughter's baby toys so she doesn't grow up too fast, the single flicker of some sort of human specificity in the film that it makes a point to stomp out in its conclusion).

- Consider the scene where Buffalo Bill dances to Goodbye Horses (an unknown song that Demme found through meeting Q Lazzarus while being driven in her taxi) versus Cage awkwardly spouting T. Rex lyrics jarringly in the middle of a scene (which is indicative of the film grasping to create some stylistic niche through T. Rex songs which never meaningfully connect to anything, and choosing to end on fucking "Bang a Gong" of all songs, the most generic choice possible, it's like if you ended a movie filled with Doors motifs on fucking "Hello I Love You"). The Goodbye Horses scene is striking and engrossing, because you're not thinking "oh there's Ted Lavine putting on makeup and dancing", the performance is so transformative that you're thinking "this is Buffalo Bill putting on makeup and dancing". Longlegs making effectively zero effort to transform Nicolas Cage at all and have him do the most quintessential Nicolas Cage hamming is such a massive failure for a movie hinging on "the unknowable" (Osgood's pretentious usage of this in interviews is especially hilarious considering this movie has the most babying, audience disrespectful infodump sequence I've seen in years). This isn't a fuckin Anton Chigurh rising from the depths of hell, this is Nic fuckin Cage in a cheap mask shouting fucking "hail satan", this is 12 year old creepypasta levels of corny we're dealing with here.

- Which leads into the demonic stuff, which is the laziest way you can resolve a procedural ever. I remember I used to take turns with buds making stories in the game Sleep is Death (long story), and whenever the stakes in a story got too convoluted for me to resolve in a way consistent with the established story logic, Id just say fuck it and introduce some exaggerated supernatural element. That's exactly how the writing here feels, that they just fuckin gave up, and to boot they really chose the fucking Christian devil as their big bad?? Complete with the most generic goat horned depiction?? AND A CREEPY DOLL WITH RED EYES?? ARE WE IN FUCKING ANNABELLE 8???? If you take a script straight out of The Devil Inside or one of the thousand movies called Deliver Us From Evil, throw in some aspect ratio changes, play the jump scares at 0.25x speed, and market it using vague screencaps, suddenly we got the viral Elevated Horror sensation of the moment.

- And then there's the ending, where you take the one guy with any flicker of humanity in the film, and have him kill his wife for laughs (I dont know how else you can read the "you'll still be in the kitchen" line because it sure got a laugh in my theater). Then you cut to Nic Cage laughing at the audience for even caring in the first place, laughing for believing you'd have the balls or creativity for a legitimate followthrough. Fuck that, man.

EDIT: Gotta share this baffling interview quote from the Oz himself where he randomly decides to respond in-character as the Joker apparently:

Q: How did Longlegs’s love of the devil impact the way that you and makeup effects artist, Harlow MacFarlane, brought the character to life?

A: The idea as written in the script was that he has his career as a sort of henchman of the devil, right? Like an agent of Satan, let’s say. His life, his career as that had left him pretty fucked up, right? It left him pretty demolished, pretty ruined, pretty wrecked. Like someone who’s been a fentanyl addict...