Longlegs’s Ending Does a Little Too Much Explaining

The new horror film’s potent menace rides on the inexplicable — which is why it’s too bad when it starts overexplaining itself. Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection

In several ways, Longlegs closely resembles the classic serial-killer procedurals that inspire it. Maika Monroe plays Lee Harker, an FBI agent whose target seems to take a personal interest in her, recalling Clarice Sterling’s relationship with Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Then there are all the coded messages — the subject of her investigation, Longlegs, kills families whose youngest daughters’ birthdays fall on the 14th of the month, and he leaves creepy Wingdings-style notes behind. This inspires manic puzzle-solving reminiscent of David Fincher’s sleuths in Se7en and Zodiac. And so on and so forth.

What’s different about this new chiller by writer-director Oz Perkins is its embrace of the supernatural. Early on, Harker and her partner scout a sleepy suburban neighborhood and, suddenly, a menacing force overcomes her. The homes are practically replicas, yet she somehow knows that this is the one they’re looking for — and she’s right. Her partner knocks on the door and is met with a bullet. Harker clears the perimeter and finds a deranged man (alas, not Longlegs himself) as well as the first of many cryptic memos.

This culminates in a Satanic-possession plot that eschews the pseudo-realism of Longlegs’s detective-thriller forebears. Harker’s lonely investigations are often interrupted by jump scares courtesy of dark apparitions with the silhouettes of nesting dolls. Then there’s Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), a pasty weirdo who looks like a radiation-exposed version of Bob from Twin Peaks — freaky, but just a flesh-and-bone man. It’s his nebulous connection to the crimes that disturbs us: While he leaves notes behind at each grisly scene, the murders themselves are committed by seemingly average fathers who kill their entire families before killing themselves. As such, the investigation demands a bit of magical thinking. Conventional logic is futile here, underscoring the film’s dread and delirium. Unfortunately, Perkins’s script seems to anticipate its own tangled wackiness and, by the end, all that productively murky build-up is negated by a last act that feels redundant. It’s as though Perkins is tugging at our sleeves, making sure that we got it — and that’s too bad considering that the film’s potent menace (at least up to this point) rides on the inexplicable.

Key to that menace, and one of the film’s virtues, is how it channels unease through a distinctly feminine lens. Fictional women detectives have a distinct relationship to murder, at least symbolically. Real serial killers like Ted Bundy and “Son of Sam” Berkowitz famously targeted women and young girls, and onscreen, crime movies and slashers have perpetuated the image of the vulnerable female victim. Women detectives stand directly against this trope, but there’s an element of self-consciousness to the dynamic; an uneasy awareness that, however hard you work to break out of these misogynist boxes, there will still be maniacs who, to quote Bundy, simply want “to cause great bodily harm to females.” This existential discomfort simmers throughout Longlegs. We feel it when Harker is officially assigned to the case by her kindly superior, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), and is made to look at the mutilated corpse of a woman for the first time, and when Carter introduces Harker to his family, specifically his daughter Ruby. Harker is not good with kids, and she’s painfully awkward when 9-year-old Ruby shows her her room, her pink canopy bed — and her Barbie dolls, who are “all tied up in the box,” as Ruby explains, an image that evokes women’s objectification and how often female bodies are reduced to playthings for sick minds.

Arguably, what makes Longlegs’s loony plotting work is that its paranormal twists are anchored to this gendered anxiety. Perkins isn’t concerned with the fucked-up motivations of his killers — Satan’s a convenient scapegoat because we don’t question why he’s capital-E evil, and as such there’s no point in making sense of Longlegs’s intentions either. (Cage’s screeching free jazz of a performance squares with the pure chaos intended here.) What stings is Harker’s realization that she is at the center of a grand network of magic schemes and conspiracies that play upon the defenselessness of little girls, a feeling metatextually enhanced by Monroe’s previous roles as a final girl (in It Follows and The Guest, for instance). The clues to the crime are embedded in Harker’s childhood, to a past when she was merely someone’s daughter: innocent, susceptible, and brimming with youthful imagination. She finds a photograph of Longlegs in her childhood playchest, unlocking a repressed memory of him. We find out Harker was the little girl with braids from the wintry opening scene, in which she is lured out of her home by the sight of a mysterious parked car and encounters Longlegs (whose face we don’t see till much later) for the first time. How come she’s still alive?

Eventually — and this is where Perkins really begs you to stick with him — we find out that Longlegs is merely a Satan-worshipping dollmaker and that in this world, Satan is real. All this time, Longlegs’s job has been to (1) make child-sized dolls that serve as vessels for demonic possession and (2) threaten a mother (specifically Harker’s) with the killing of her child in order to get her to deliver the dolls to unsuspecting families. The Satanic dolls then do the rest by essentially brainwashing fathers to enact brutally spectacular versions of domestic homicide. Harker may have been spared because her hoarder mom, Ruth (Alicia Ruth), raised her without a father. Although with no daddy in the picture, Longlegs was able to turn Ruth into one of Satan’s minions — and, it turns out, score free lodging in the basement of Harker’s family home.

Longlegs is arrested and bashes his own brain to bits in the interrogation room, screaming “Hail Satan” as his last words. Before this bloody send-off, he implicates Ruth without explaining the extent to which she is involved. When Harker (along with a senior agent) pulls up to question her mother, Ruth clarifies her role immediately, slaughtering the other agent with a shotgun. She also blasts a doll that looks like Lee as a child, as if she’s mercy killing her real little girl trapped in this object. Then she zooms off to Carter’s home. It’s the 14th — Ruby’s birthday — and Ruth is already there when her daughter arrives. We see Ruby admire her new gift: one of Longlegs’s cursed dolls.

Carter’s family, their average suburban life, is ravaged by evil forces, and the doll — a seemingly wholesome symbol of girlhood — is the corrupting agent. The Chucky and Annabelle movies, as well as last year’s M3GAN, exploit the disturbing potential of puppets gone wild, but Longlegs connects the child’s plaything to a form of self-denial. Plus, Mommie dearest (whom Longlegs threatened to kill earlier in the film, encouraging Harker to distance herself from her beloved sole family member) is highly complicit, debatably one step closer to committing the murders than Longlegs himself. Dressed up as a nun (proving that she was never really hyper-religious), Ruth visited all the murdered families and delivered the dolls. She is essentially Longlegs’s (er, I suppose Satan’s) henchwoman, initially forced to perform these dirty deeds to keep her daughter from harm. By the end, however, it appears she’s started drinking the condemned Kool-Aid. The entire final sequence, which sees Carter, with a rictus grin, slaughtering his wife in the kitchen, envisions the self-destruction of the nuclear family. Harker looks on, petrified, as everything that was once so warm and innocent is violently defiled, the true and terrifying nature of her own girlhood making itself known.

To save Ruby, Harker kills Carter, her surrogate father, as well as her own mother, then turns the gun on the doll. The camera takes the damned object’s point of view and looks down the barrel of Harker’s gun. In these final moments, we don’t see her pull the trigger. She hesitates. Has she too been caught in Satan’s grip? Grim and hypnotic, Longlegs evokes a nightmare state, and the end reveals how Harker’s entire life has been ensnared by these (literal) demons. It’s a shock that Monroe conveys beautifully; she practically reverts to adolescence in the way she wobbles and darts her eyes around the Carters’ living room. Everything, and I mean everything, is divulged in these final moments, the most egregious signpost being the ham-fisted flashbacks in which Ruth tells a bedtime story about a little girl and a mother who live above a man in a basement. After this, Harker must destroy the part of herself that could look at her mother, her dolls, through rose-colored glasses. Ruby, perhaps under the curse herself, is delighted by the evil doll; she caresses it fondly, not knowing its true intentions. Obviously, Harker must blow it up, but it’s also that naïvete, the childish ability to love easily and trust, that she, in that moment, must decide to let go.