long day's journey into leg

fyi, minor spoilers ahead for the movie longlegs, most crucially the shock twist that i did not enjoy the movie longlegs

the other day, although in a very real sense also five thousand years ago, we went to see longlegs (2024) at our local cinema and were ushered in by a woman who checked our tickets and asked whether we were there to see longyleggy. whether or not this was the same woman who, in 2019, checked our tickets for it chapter 2 and asked, with a look that implied a long and complex battle with the void, whether we were there "to see the clown", i could not tell you - but either way, it gives you a sense of the atmosphere. ask me whether or not i have, in my time, sat through a showing of the turning (2020) in a screen entirely unrelieved by other moviegoers except for one woman in a caterpillar sleeping suit, or witnessed two people nearly come to blows during a screening of malignant (2021), and the answer would be yes. it has it all, our local odeon - "all" in this context meaning sticky carpets, weird sight angles, a cold place where a cold place ought not to be, a staff composed entirely by the damned, and a portal to hell located in the basement. one time, a dear friend took us to see scream 6 (2023), misread his tickets and led us merrily into the tail end of the 6pm screening when we should have been watching the movie at 8. at no point, as we shuffled in with our untouched snacks and drinks and sat down, only to immediately watch the entire reveal play out before us, did any member of the packed 6pm screening lean over to inform us that we might have found our way into the wrong room. but then of course, why would they, since they had presumably always been there, and would always be there, just as the staff would always be there, and the maintenance crew would always be there, and even i would always be there, because i am the caretaker, sir, and have always been the caretaker, and anyway i appear to have drifted away from the point.

longlegs is a movie which has to be experienced, to some degree, as distinct from the conversation surrounding it. it's a difficult thing, to find oneself at the wrong end of the hype machine, with reviews declaring you the best thing since the silence of the lambs (1991), and it is likewise difficult to climb out of the self-inflicted hole of a truly magnificent publicity campaign. it happened, in my opinion, with skinamarink (2022) - a movie i witnessed off the back of three solid weeks of people online declaring I PHYSICALLY SHAT MYSELF THEY HAD TO EVACUATE THE CINEMA and which turned out to be a two hour screensaver from windows '95 - and to a lesser extent with late night with the devil (2024) - a movie i actually hugely enjoyed, even if i don't think it necessarily worked. what i'm saying is that i'm aware, by now, of the way these things operate, and i'm aware that the more overblown the hype, the greater the ladle of salt one has to apply to the movie in question. so when i tell you that i thought about all these things very carefully on going into longlegs and then came out royally pissed off anyway, i hope you will understand that i have at least done my due diligence.

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longlegs is a movie about an fbi cold case, involving plausibly satanic murders apparently carried out by a serial killer who goes by "longlegs" in the cryptic messages he likes to leave at crime scenes. exactly why he is called longlegs is a question which has already been asked by other, better, writers without being sufficiently answered, since his legs are not so long, but if you have follow up questions on that front then i am afraid you are already thinking too hard about this movie. i have said longlegs is a movie "about" these things, but in actual fact longlegs is nothing so much as a movie replete with gestures towards aboutness which lose steam or reveal themselves to be pointless or turn themselves inside out like swedish fish and fall inelegantly out of frame. longlegs has a high opinion of itself, in a much as it purports to be about family and grief and memory and satanic panic and law enforcement and guilt and grace and emptiness and fear, but what it actually is is the episode of the simpsons where homer's like "i'm a white male aged 18-49, everybody listens to me" and it transpires that his influence has led to the creation of a product called NUTS AND GUM - TOGETHER AT LAST. it is a movie people have decided is glorious outsider art because it shows you a couple of different aspect ratios, when actually it is a mid-season episode of angel. is a movie which made me think, repeatedly and at increasing pitches of outrage as the night wore on, that ethan hawke did not die in the movie sinister (2012) just for longlegs to tromp in on its entirely regular-sized legs and be like what if exactly this but worse.

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the movie sinister, just by the by, absolutely fucks, although we all have to pretend that it doesn't fuck because it was marketed as being "from the minds of the people who brought you insidious", which is probably defamation of character. the thing about the movie sinister is that it is almost exactly the same as the movie longlegs, except that it works and also ethan hawke is it in, and also it posits that the only acceptable way to do investigative journalism is to sit in a basement watching snuff films on a super 8 projector and drinking whiskey and wearing a bennington college t-shirt, which is a great piece of character work and i hope that irresponsible podcast does an episode about him. the point of the movie sinister is that a fiendish entity has been going into people's homes and inducing children to murder their families whilst also filming said murders in the manner of a vampire weekend music video, because the devil is i guess a baroque pop sadboi. ethan hawke - a sort of jon krakauer of true crime in that he keeps writing books and then getting into fights about it - has moved his family into a house where one of these murders took place, for research, but has not told his wife, who has apparently at no point thought to be like ethan hawke why have you moved us to a tracthouse in bumfuck new jersey where there are scorpions in the attic i thought you were a millionaire. things happen, largely at random and all heavily interspered with additional footage of ethan hawke's seemingly endless supply of super 8s, all of which he watches in the manner of a man who is definitely just doing research and not about to get caught self-asphyxiating over a movie of someone driving a lawnmower over their family. at one point, james ransone turns up, because james ransome is always in these types of movies, and points at a corkboard covered in twine that ethan hawke has created like whoa, you have a corkboard covered in twine, and it is very funny. the movie is actually deeply frightening several times, which is a fact i am willing to own even despite the fact that its wikipedia page cheerfully notes that it has "developed a reputation for scariness", which is like saying that gareth southgate has developed a reputation for managing the england team. it is a movie which does exactly what it is attempting to do, and does it well, and does it swiftly, and also vincent d'onofrio turns up via zoom call to be like "ethan hawke you're dealing with a demon called bughuul"- a word he pronounces in a tone of voice like he can't believe he has to deal with this bozo again, and also ethan hawke's character is called ellison oswalt, because he is a writer, and the whole thing fucks.

it is a better movie than longlegs, and the fact that its wikipedia page has to tell us that it has "developed a reputation for scariness" whilst the wikipedia page for longlegs is like "this movie is so intellectual probably zizek would love it" is incredibly annoying.

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fact - my wife did not want to watch longlegs for a very long time because she had been sufficiently freaked out by the amount of people on twitter posting like THIS MOVIE MADE ME BELIEVE IN THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEVIL, although after the fact she confirmed that longlegs did not make her believe in the existence of the devil

fact - there is a point in the movie longlegs where a criminally underused and extremely talented-with-the-slop-he-has-to-work-with blair underwood is like "i want to have a drink while you explain things to me" and that is truly a perfect summary of this movie - a film so simultaneously gassed on its own premise and yet untrusting of its audience that it spends fully twenty minutes of the third act monologuing the twist at you

fact - it's kind of amazing how we, as a culture, have decided it is now passe to describe the movie hereditary (2018) as a truly transcendent piece of modern horror cinema, but this movie really reminded me how rare it actually was, to watch a new film that was both tautly terrifying and so deeply interested in its characters. there is a moment in the movie longlegs where it comes to your attention that one character may have to kill another, and this is intended to be a hugely affecting dilemma, but it isn't, because you don't know or care about any of these losers

fact - much has been made of nicolas cage in this film, so when i say he is by far and away the least interesting thing in it in either direction - good or bad - i hope you will understand that that's the best i can do and i really don't know what else it is you want from me. he's fine? he's there? it was cool when he said hail satan, i guess?

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longlegs is not actually a bad movie, i don't think. it looks beautiful, it has some semi-interesting things to say about memory, the cast is excellent, there are two very good jump scares, i liked the bit in maika monroe's little coffin-like house, i liked blair underwood, hail satan, all of that. the thing here - of course - is a strange and pervasive squeamishness about genre, and about the sloppiness of genre in general, which i'm not sure is actually even the fault of the movie itself. people think it is good because it looks like that, and because in many ways not much happens, and because what happens is aesthetic enough to cancel out the gore. i have compared this movie to sinister, but i could also compare it to hereditary or, indeed, the lodge (a movie starring riley keough that about fifteen people saw because hereditary functionally beat it to death, but which was nonetheless a flawed but deeply eerie movie about what the fuck happens when you get away from a cult, and also had alicia silverstone in it). in any case, the fact of longlegs' peculiar elevation of high art in the face of all these other, better movies - many of which have been treated like subsets of the conjuring franchise as a result of marketing alone - is extremely irritating, and i’m still grumbling about it. so actually maybe, after all that, it is the hype that got me. well. i guess i am only human.