LONGLEGS
Longlegs has been subject to a lot of hype claiming that it is the scariest film of the year or decade or maybe even century, and it certainly maintains a tense and creepy atmosphere throughout, but the scariest moment comes before the credits, where the titular character is introduced gabbling some disturbing nonsense with his face partly out of shot, then suddenly ducks down to enter the frame – the camera cutting away, however, before we can properly see his face.
It’s as if he is too disturbing to contemplate, though later we see enough of him to be well aware that this is Nicolas Cage, even beneath a considerable quantity of make-up. Your reaction to this film will probably depend on how you feel about Cage’s performance, which is certainly not subtle, and which some find silly.
Though the high voice and blurred gender boundaries here surely invoke the same ‘trans panic’ that Silence of the Lambs was taken to account for, I found his performance disturbingly outré rather than camp (even if I was occasionally reminded of Noel Fielding in The Mighty Boosh) – he’s a child’s nightmare come to life.
Though the child in the opening sequence is now an adult, specifically FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who apparently has psychic powers and is now on Longlegs’ trail due to his involvement in a series of murders – which he did not, however, commit himself, though he has left letters at households in which fathers have brutally and inexplicably slaughtered their families and themselves.
That Harker encountered him as a child is something she is yet to remember/discover, so the police investigation is also a journey back into her own childhood. And in addition to the procedural and psychological aspects there is also a supernatural element, as Longlegs proves to be a sort of Satanic toymaker who creates life-size dolls of little girls which somehow turn the girls’ fathers, shortly after the dolls’ introduction into a given household, into killers.
Longlegs has also recruited Harker’s mother (Alicia Witt) into his evil plan, which she has agreed to on the condition that he doesn’t harm Harker. Meaning that Harker is complicit in the deaths she is investigating, even if she doesn’t know it. With her psychic powers she seems to sense it though, theorising an ‘accomplice’, who delivers the devil dolls to the unlucky recipients and stays to watch the fireworks.
That this turns out to be her own mother (dressed as a nun) is a shock to her but not, by this stage, to the audience – who might, however, wonder why the presence of a visiting nun with a big cardboard box at every crime scene has not been picked up on at some point.
Still, if Satan’s involved, all bets are off. ‘Hail Satan’ is the film’s last line, uttered by Longlegs in Cage’s most knowing moment here. Longlegs is already dead at this point, so it feels like this is Cage taking a bow, and it’s hard to know how seriously we are meant to take it. I mean, this is set in the 90’s and I lived through those, but I don’t remember Satan taking over. Although would I have noticed?
Director Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony) keeps a tight enough stylistic lid on the proceedings to almost make you think that it all (psychological, supernatural, procedural) comes together, and the performances are always convincing; but the serious tone and the precision of the mise en scene seem at odds with the underlying bonkersness of the whole thing, which causes a perceptible wobble throughout.
ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS
Perhaps it is easier to believe these things when they are set in the 1990’s, which doesn’t seem that long ago to me but is, I have to concede, in a previous century, which to younger audiences no doubt makes it seem swathed in Gothic mists that might conceal anything – even, perhaps, a mythical ‘Golden Age’.
Chinese film Only The River Flows also delves into the 90’s, and also uses a procedural plot to lead its protagonist, Ma (Zhu Yilong) into murky regions of the soul. But this is not a horror film, it’s art, as is signalled early on when the detective self-reflexively sets up his office in a closed-down cinema.
It is as if this location imbues Ma’s investigation into a number of killings with a significance the mere reality can’t bear: when a very obvious ‘madman’ appears as a suspect, Ma continues to question whether he is really responsible when it increasingly seems to be the case that he is.
Ma’s investigations turn up a secret love affair and a closeted transvestite (?) but bringing these things to light only causes harm to the ‘suspects’ – indeed, sometimes it seems like the investigation is causing the deaths, with Ma and the madman increasingly twinned, as he becomes almost as exasperating to his superiors as the perpetrator of the crimes.
Unlike Harker in Longlegs, Ma is not drawn into his murky past, it is his present that is tricky: in addition to his police work, his wife is pregnant with a child who might have a genetic disorder (his initial blunt suggestion is that she ‘do an abortion’). The only mystery his past seems to hold is whether or not he has previously awarded a ‘Grade 3 Merit’, which he seems to remember happening, though nobody around him can confirm it.
In the end he is awarded this merit, while the film closes with the a shot of husband, wife and new baby apparently blissfully happy, though a flickering at the corner of the screen attests to the fact that this is only an image, from a film.
Only The The River Flows seems to be setting up a tension between film as surface and film as an elaborate construction designed to ‘draw you in’ to its hidden depths (Ma, at his lowest point, wades into the river in an apparent suicide attempt).
Do we accept the final image of the ‘happy family’ at face value, or investigate further? Ingeniously, director Wei Shujun has placed the viewer in the exact same position as Ma. The Chinese authorities would no doubt recommend accepting this ‘happy ending’ without question, and this might seem to be the film’s overt moral given that Ma’s digging only results in confusion and misery.
But Only The River Flows leaves us with more doubt than certainty: the closest thing we get to a What Really Happened flashback is a dream sequence. The ambiguity is carefully calculated – unlike in Longlegs, which undoubtedly is an elaborate construction designed to draw you in, but where the doubt you are left with is more over whether those who constructed it have laid the foundations properly.
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