Longlegs Review

Review of Longlegs (2024) by screenqueeen: 👎 2/5

My mind was reeling after this one. took a while to collect my thoughts but there are two main things I've picked up on here.

the first is at its core LONGLEGS is no different than any other horror/police procedural investigation film once the arthouse-iness washes away (admitting that in fact, the presentation of this is gorgeous and extremely well thought-out).

nothing really goes anywhere: the zodiac-like cyphers, the pattern of killings, or any actual motivation behind Harker or Longlegs's drive towards doing anything. they progress to a point then stop when it forms the logical puzzle piece it's supposed to, but then never moves forward in the grand scheme's big picture. a mystery this is not.

it's almost parody but even something on that level would have to saysomething about what it's imitating, and Perkins clearly wants to participate rather than deconstruct. I know he's capable of it but the "flourishes" he puts on becomes more worrying than satisfying in the genre conventions he is lazily leaning against.

nothing has a true independent moment. the biggest and most glaring sin this film commits to is spelling out exactly what has been going on, that could have been a revelation to the person we're following in an actual investigation against this killer. for where this goes the final act could have been something special, entertainingly left-of-field, and a real sleight of hand trick but it get so clumsily fumbled.

the second is the handling of Longlegs as a character. in press notes Perkins outlines him as someone who has undergone numerous botched plastic surgery procedures on his face in an attempt to bring to reality the rock star mentality he brings to his inner drive, on top of the fact that he is a huge hard rock fan (the film quoting a T. Rex line, a Mickey Finn poster in his hidey hole and the film ending on Get It On definitely bring this point home without a hitch).

how audiences are reading his character is his assumed transness, especially in regards to how closely this mirrors SILENCE OF THE LAMBS which is more than a little on purpose but perhaps not what was intended by putting forth a character who is being perceived as trans playing the "killer in a dress" trope yet again. again if this is a parody of that, it doesn't say anything about how this trope has been used in any way. it just appears to use it, ifthat really is the intent.

but here's the thing: by not addressing it, people's assumptions are going to snap to a trans allegory and that's pretty fucking dangerous. you gotta put that shit IN THE MOVIE if you don't want your titular character's identity to be misconstrued.

so if Perkins wants the audience to know that this is just a hard rocker who has simply gotten too much poor work done on his visage we could have had that in the film itself rather than a mess of confusion surrounding the question of how the audience is supposed to see this. Perkins should know of all people what coding a film like this or PSYCHO before it does to society at large well after the fact, as an attempt to digest it in a lens people will use to compare to their lives and experiences.

this film is so lazy the first set of points don't even matter anymore, this takes precedence over any misstep in technical or artistic prowess because it's all built on why Longlegs is shown to us in this way and why in a police procedural serial killer investigation no details about his life come into focus or are of any interest to the agents investigating the murders he has apparently committed or influenced.

what the fuck happened here?