Longlegs (2024)

After demonstrating what may or may not be some ESP abilities, young FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is drafted into the hunt for a peculiar serial killer. The killer, let’s call him Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), doesn’t actually appear to lay hands on his victims, but somehow gets them to kill each other, following his own ritualistic specifics.

There may or may not be black magic or Satanism involved; in any case, Lee is going to find herself drawn into proceedings rather more personally than a member of any police force would hope to.

If anyone expected me to be part of the backlash against Oz Perkins’s newest film, a rather wonderful example of weird and highly individual genre cinema also making a surprising amount of money and pleasing many a critic, they probably don’t know me. This thing was made with someone with my tastes as its ideal audience, and I’m certainly not going to pretend otherwise.

While this was certainly very consciously schooled on the aesthetics of Silence of the Lamb and what follows (though Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s wonderful Cure is probably more important here), Longlegs makes clear very early on that it isn’t trying to be even a dramatized “realistic” police procedural or serial killer thriller. It is rather a film that uses elements and tropes of these genres to lure an audience into something stranger and a little more subversive, a world and a headspace built on the kind of nightmare logic that nearly appears to make sense but tends to shift and get blurry around its edges in the moments when you’re not exactly thinking or looking.

Which, really, is pretty much what I expect of Perkins by now. Particularly the way in which the film’s metaphors are well-built to suggest certain interpretations (here about alienation and family), and the plot could nearly neatly resolve but then doesn’t quite is very much in keeping with the director’s modus operandi in his earlier films. This isn’t Perkins being unable to make a movie that is soluble like a crossword puzzle, but him aggressively rejecting the kind of naively rationalist world view that can still believe in such a thing as an expression of reality. Instead of neat resolutions and explanations, this is a film about slowly building dread, the horrors of facing one’s nightmares and still not ending them, and those very bad moments in the middle of the night when you can’t quite discern if there’s a difference between nightmare and waking life.

Needless to say, there are certain, sometimes innocuous, shots in here that I still can’t shake days after having seen the film.

That Longlegs manages to hold up this mood for the whole of its runtime is a little, dark, wonder; that it does so while also offering a perfect, naturalistic performance by Monroe at its core is particularly clever; and that rather a lot of viewers can’t or won’t go where Perkins leads with this one, I won’t blame them for.

I, on the other hand, cannot imagine watching another film this year that’s quite so much me and for me.

Significant Other (2022)

Warning: while I’m not going to go into details about the film’s big moment in the middle, I’ll talk around it in a way that might be considered a spoiler to some!

Long-time couple Ruth (Maika Monroe) and Harry (Jake Lacy) are going on a backtracking trip somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

It’s all Jake’s idea, really, for he has done a lot of this sort of thing before he met Ruth, and genuinely wants her to appreciate this thing he loves. It’s not a good idea, mind you. For while Ruth clearly is as much in love with Harry as he is with her, she is also a tightly packed bundle of anxieties and depression for whom a camping trip in the wilds even with the person she loves most in the world is sheer terror. Given that none of this is news to Harry, it’s a bit of mystery why he believes this situation will be the ideal moment to ask Ruth to marry him, but there you have it.

As if relationship troubles weren’t bad enough, things turn rather horrible when Ruth makes a discovery inside of a cave.

And that’s really where I like to leave the plot of Dan Berk’s and Robert Olsen’s Significant Other, for the big middle plot development is the sort of thing I think a viewer needs to experience all by themselves. Apart from being clever but not annoyingly so, it certainly escalates the situation for and between the characters in a pretty terrible way. It’s also absolutely of a piece with the portrayal of a fraught but loving relationship we’ve seen before, still letting the film speak about its themes while turning things dramatically horrific in a manner that resonates with all that surrounds it.

It’s at this point of the proceedings where it becomes clear how good the performances of Monroe and Lacy actually are, as well as how cleverly the script and the actors work together to make certain things ambiguous without cheating the audience or betraying the characters. Monroe, having been in quite a few classics or semi-classics of fantastic cinema by now, always seems a bit underrated to me, mostly because her acting style on the surface seems to fall into the “pretty face, big eyes, sloping shoulders” kind of cliché. In actuality, she has a lot of nuance, making little shifts in expression, posture and emotional projection that suggest she is putting quite a bit of thought into her characters and position whoever she is playing as a believable human being in often quite strange circumstances. Lacy for his part manages to play through some major shifts in a very organic feeling manner, until he comes to a point where he can really milk certain developments for maximum creepiness (with a good sense of the emotionally grotesque).

Apart from turning into a very clever piece of science fiction horror, Significant Other is also highly effective and thoughtful as the portrayal of a relationship in which one of the partners suffers from mental illness, specifically depression and social anxieties. For once, writer/directors actually seem to understand how frustratingly like self-sabotage these things can feel for the person suffering from them, how dispiriting and undermining of one’s trust in oneself, to the point where one can love somebody with all one’s heart, but can never convince oneself one is actually good enough for them. And because the film really does understand, it doesn’t make Ruth or Harry the asshole in this situation – even though Harry’s attempt at turning Ruth into an outdoors person seems very misguided – and doesn’t question their love or commitment. All of which makes the horror plot hit all the harder, of course.

Three Films Make A Post: Norman Bates is back home with Mother again!

Psycho III (1986): At the time when this was made, critics inexplicably saw this second Psycho sequel as clearly superior to the actually brilliant second one (about which I’ll hopefully write someday). I simply can’t see it: Anthony Perkins’s direction is bland and often aims for a sub-Ken Russell style of camp he’s simply not good enough a director to reach, the script is obvious and not very interesting, and even Perkins’s performance is lacking the element of humanity he found in the Hitchcock original and even more so in the second movie.

Otherwise, this repeats a couple of the least interesting plot beats of film number two and has scenes that “nod” to the original in a way only Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot reshoot managed to surpass in pointlessness.

Watcher (2022): On paper, Chloe Okuno’s thriller about an American woman either becoming paranoid or becoming the future victim of a killer in Bucharest is yet another “Girl/Woman in the Whatever” thriller, this time with quite a few direct homages to Hitchcock (that guy again). But Okuno manages to actually recontextualize the Hitchcockian elements and use them to build a female perspective that runs parallel as well as against Hitchcock’s often creepily male one, enriching a genre while clearly following most of its rules. The film’s visual style and feel also very pleasantly reminded me of the best giallos as well as a little of Don’t Look Now. Add to this highly focussed and effective performances, particularly by genre stalwarts Maika Monroe and Burn Gorman, and you have quite the film.

Patience (After Sebald) (2012): Ending on an equally high note, there’s this hypnotic documentary by Grant Gee that follows the traces of W.G. Sebald and his great book “The Rings of Saturn” in a manner as digressive and complicated as its subject.

Most of what would usually be talking heads in this kind of film comes from the off, which leaves space for longer thoughts and sentences and enables Gee to strengthen and deepen, or counterpoint, ideas via his successful attempts at recreating the mood and style of Sebald’s photography. The film’s understanding of how important mood is for its subject is rather impressive anyway; it also explains why this needs to be a movie instead of a monograph.

Past Misdeeds: It Follows (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Jay (Maika Monroe) certainly didn’t expect the first night of sex (and perhaps her first night of sex ever) with her new boyfriend (Jake Weary) to be the beginning of a nightmare. Right afterwards, he sedates her, and when she wakes up, she finds herself inside of the ruins of a parking garage and tied to a wheelchair, while her former beau circles the area, clearly looking out for someone (something?), and explaining the new rules of her life to her. If he is to be believed, Jay is now infected with the attentions of a supernatural entity that inexorably, mostly in slow walking tempo, will try to get closer to her, to finally be able to touch and kill her. The only escape is passing the thing on via intercourse like a very nasty sexual chain mail; then she’d be safe from the thing, at least until it has killed whomever she has infected. Afterwards, it’d be back on her trace again. Which, obviously, is also the reason for the very weird exposition session.

Once she’s free again, Jay is as shell-shocked as one would suspect, yet when she finds herself followed by an old woman in what looks like a hospital gown during school, she very quickly begins to believe the insane story. It’s all true too – with added little horrors like the fact the thing can only be seen by the infected or the once infected, and stays invisible (yet, as it turns out, not untouchable) by anyone else while its projects some disturbing shape at its chosen victim. When Jay seeks help from her sister Kelly (Lile Sepe), and her friends Yara (Olivia Luccardi) and Paul (Keir Gilchrist), they unexpectedly don’t think she’s crazy for long. At least, her fear seems to be real enough to them, and come time, the reality of the thing following Jay will be too. Perhaps, that’s even enough to safe her life.

It seems absolutely useless to pretend I harbour any feelings of distance towards David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. Most certainly, there’s nothing at all I find worth criticizing here, so prepare for me gushing about some of the things that are incredible about the film for the next three hundred words or so. Honestly, though, I can’t see how the film doesn’t deserve this and more.

So let’s start with my joy about encountering a film about a sexually transmitted supernatural disease that is not at all attempting to blame its protagonists, or sex as such, or the evil shallow youth of today, or the Internet; in fact, it even understands the shitty little things someone might do for survival, yet doesn’t use them to suggest someone deserves whatever horrible thing might happen to him/her because of that. This fits nicely into a very un-horror movie like approach to characterization where the mandatory group of more or less teenage friends indeed feel like people who have actual relationships with each other, as well as a shared past and sympathy and love for one another, instead of being a bunch of assholes who hate one another and are only sharing a film because the scriptwriter feels the need to represent certain clichés (or is part of a cabal of Cabin in the Woods style cultists), if they fit as part of a social group or not. This doesn’t mean there aren’t echoes of your typical horror film characters here, but Mitchell reimagines these archetypes as people. Not surprisingly, that’s an effective way to make an audience care about one’s characters.

I also just love how subtle a film surrounding a very unsubtle metaphor about sexually transmitted diseases can be in practice. Instead of being a film all about sexual disease (or sex as a disease, or pregnancy fears and so on) It Follows shows itself more interested in the ways people of its characters’ age group and social stratus relate to one another, and what sexuality, and friendship, and love mean to them. A lot of the film’s effectiveness here can be explained through its absolute focus on its characters and their travails, never giving the impression this is a film whose only reason for existence is to teach its audience a valuable lesson. Unless that lesson is “it’s complicated”, because that – emotionally and ethically – certainly is part of It Follows. There is also a blessed lack of irony to praise in this regard, with no moment at all when the film feels the need to turn and wink at its audience, never keeping it secure in the knowledge that this is all just a bit silly, and a bit of a joke. Mitchell and his film treat the Weird (and this film really deserves the capitalization of the w) without any of that desperate need to demonstrate they are above it, keeping it a disquieting, and un-natural part of their world.

Furthermore, it’s not difficult to appreciate how much of the film’s plot works via suggestion, how some particularly important points of it are never explained or told outright, but impressed on the viewer via the excellent young actors doing their stuff and the film insinuating things instead of just outright telling them.


All this does sound a bit dry, of course. However, Mitchell isn’t just a very interesting and thoughtful director of the social, but also one hell of a horror director. It’s – for me, at least – completely impossible not to gush about the way It Follows makes use of the whole of the screen – depth and width – soon keeping the audience watching the background and seemingly innocuous parts of the screen just like its characters do. It’s remarkable too that most of the film’s fright scenes take place by daylight, at the same time providing Mitchell with the opportunity to avoid various horror movie mainstays/clichés that only ever work at night, and giving him the space to come up with new ones based on large, open and often even well lit spaces. At the same time, Mitchell’s direction understands the intimate equally well, with many a moment that fleshes out characters in simple yet very effective visual ways. And because there’s also an irrepressible threat following the characters, even these quiet, human moments are infected with a degree of dread waiting just in the corner of the characters’ eyes. It’s fantastic work, even more so in a film that doesn’t suffer from the bad final ten minutes syndrome  that has annoyed me in many a horror film; in It Follows, there’s hope, and dread, and existentialism, and no need for a showy twist that turns everything that came before into meaningless pap.

Past Misdeeds: The Guest (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

The Peterson family – mother Laura (Sheila Kelley), father Spencer (Leland Orser), nearly of age daughter (who’d be of age for nearly three years in my country, and legally drinking beer for nearly five) Anna (Maika Monroe) and teenage son Luke (Brendan Meyer) – are still grieving for the death of their eldest son in combat in one of America’s recent wars. One day, a stranger calling himself David (Dan Stevens) shows up at their door, introducing himself as a war buddy of the son come to pay his respects and give them a final message of love from him.

David might feel just a little bit off, but he’s also charming, attractive, attentive and seems honestly interested in each family member and their respective problems, calming the mother, buddying up to the father, half-charming the more sceptical Anna, and helping Luke out with his bully problems. Quickly, a short stay for a night or two turns into an unspoken and indefinite agreement about his staying on as a live-in family friend. However, further developments might just reveal that David’s more than he pretends to be, and perhaps even a danger to everyone he comes into contact with, in particular those people towards whom he has good intentions.

After my general dislike for You’re Next and my honest puzzlement about the critical cheering – at least in horror circles – Adam Wingard’s film got where less smug movies suffered a polite shrug, I did not expect anything much to my tastes going into his next film The Guest. What I got, however, is a truly excellent film that not just avoids nearly everything I found problematic or pretty damn annoying about its predecessor but turns it around and into an asset.

So Wingard still demonstrates an encyclopaedic knowledge of genre film history, but where demonstrating it felt like a pointless, and rather smug, gesture to me in You’re Next (So you’ve seen a lot of movies? So have I. So what?), The Guest seems to be all about actually learning from the movies that came before and then applying that knowledge to improve the film at hand and turn it into a more effective piece and telling its story better. Thus making an understanding of early John Carpenter, the same neon 80s aesthetic that dominated Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, and all those thrillers about mentally ill people worming themselves into bourgeois families, a natural part of the film’s language.

While Wingard keeps being interested in a subversion of genre expectations, his approach here goes far beyond “ironic” quotes or making a handful of obvious changes to the formula that play better with an contemporary audience, leaving The Guest not as a film about older movies (or even a critique of them) but a thing standing on its own that organically uses those techniques and effects that will best serve its purpose to tell a story of its own. A story I have consciously been quite vague about here because I don’t want to rob anyone of the experience of just watching this particular film for the first time without much more than the expectations you’ll have about a genre film with its particular set-up. Now, fortunately, this does not mean The Guest is a film that’s all about one big plot twist, but only that all its little twists and turns are perfectly worth experiencing on one’s own for the first time. All too often, a film having plot twists means it will make grand, dramatic gestures about developments that have little logical or thematic connection to what came before in a story, whereas here, these things all feel like natural developments and are perfectly in the flow of what came before.

It’s this flow, an organic feel, that impresses me particularly about The Guest, a feeling that each single element in plot, design, direction and acting truly feeds into the film as a whole, leaving one with the feeling of having watched something of perfect inner logic, with no single element that could disabuse one of that notion hogging the spotlight for a second too long. So this is a film with a wonderful cast – Monroe, Stevens and Meyer are particular high points – tight direction, often very inventive camera work and editing, as well as a script that is much cleverer than it pretends to be, where again all these single elements just feed into the movie as a whole. It is quite difficult to single out any one of these elements as particularly remarkable, not because of their quality or lack of such but because the film is so much of one piece, looking at the single parts it is made off seems to be completely beside the point, unless you have an academic interest in talking about film.


Of course, in theory, that’s how all films are supposed to work. However films where things come together quite this way and that still make it look easy and natural, without artifice exactly thanks to their high degree of artistry (which is by nature artificiality) aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. Again, the early John Carpenter comes to my mind the most, and that’s really how The Guest feels to me: a movie so great it deserves comparison to the best.

On ExB: It Follows (2014)

You know what’s best in life? Certainly not that lamentation of their women stuff. And nope, it’s not when filmmakers (or rather PR people) want me to post about their kickstarters and press releases even though I’m pretty clearly never posting press releases and news, nor recommend kickstarters to anyone but certain long-suffering friends (hi, Inga!), and nope, not even when people want me to write free advertising for their commercial websites (which I wouldn’t even do here if they paid me). It’s when a much-hyped film turns out to be even better than the hype promised.

Case in point is It Follows. It’s not just absolutely innocent of the annoyances I listed, but just happens to be the sort of film I can’t help but see as an instant classic. So prepare to hear me gush over the brilliant, brilliant It Follows in my column at the also press-release free Exploder Button.

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On ExB: The Guest (2014)

Given how little I enjoyed Adam Wingard’s You’re Next, I didn’t expect anything from his next movie.

What I got was a film I have a hard time not calling a masterpiece, so please follow this handy link to my gushing about it over at the venerable Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,thriller,adam wingard,dan stevens,maika monroe,brendan meyer,lance reddick,other places

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Flying Monkeys (2013)

Today in "animal smuggling is not a good idea" news, one hapless importer (Christopher Michael Cook) of protected animals for his small animal shop in the little town of Gale, Kansas brings a bit more trouble into the country than he expected. The newly acquired monkey he sells to James (Vincent Ventresca) - who needs the animal to calm the waters between himself and his daughter Joan (Maika Monroe) after he has forgotten her high school graduation ceremony(!) - is in fact not an innocent little monkey but a demon.

By night, the little bugger turns into a ravenous, winged monster monkey eating animal and human alike. On the positive side, he flies back home to Joan's and James's place on time and doesn't need to be fed. He has grown rather fond of Joan too, which might become important later on.

Meanwhile in China (looking curiously like Louisiana), the last in a long tradition of demon monkey hunters (Boni Yanagisawa and Lee Nguyen) are hoping to wrap up their family business forever by first getting rid of the last demon monkey in China, and then finding out where the hell those foolish animal smugglers have taken the other monkey, who just happens to be their leader. When they learn that the animal has been brought to the USA, the hunters know they have to act fast, for the monkeys have one rather useful super power: they can only be killed with special blessed weapons. Otherwise, when shot, for example, a killed monkey resurrects and turns into two monkeys. Given the proliferation of guns in the USA, and people's love of using them, this could spell trouble, an analysis the further developments in Dorothy-less Kansas prove all too right.

So yes, Robert Grasmere's Flying Monkeys is one SyFy movie out to teach its audience two valuable lessons: animal smuggling is troublesome, and using guns only furthers the problem you're trying to solve with them in the long run. Both are lessons quite difficult to disagree with, particularly when they come from a film as agreeably imaginative and earnestly silly as this one.

As all other SyFy movies ever, Flying Monkeys also drops important knowledge about family troubles, namely, that your widowed father might be too distracted to come to your high school graduation on time, but he'll put in extra time once you're threatened by flying killer monkeys. Though (and that's another quite agreeable element here) a teenage daughter might still need to do her main monkey killing without daddy. So don't let anyone tell you again you can learn nothing worthwhile from SyFy's output.

The rest is a competent standard SyFy monster movie without aggressive comedy stylings, with some fun set pieces particularly once the monkeys have begun multiplying, friendly shout-outs in the direction of Oz (obviously) and Gremlins, and the usual assortment of monster-food teenagers, sheriffs and evil animal importers. So if you're in for a simple, fun, and decidedly non-stupid time, Flying Monkeys has got your back (in its claws to drag you onto a roof and eat you).

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