I am currently in Berlin, which is very nice, and I had an absolute ball bringing my new show You Wait. Time Passes. to the Comedy Cafe last night – thanks to all the good folks at the Berlin Fringe for having me! Because I’m here for a few days, this week’s newsletter will be a film review I wrote last week. Enjoy!

I went to see Longlegs, a new horror film by Osgood Perkins starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage. You might have heard of it because the marketing team played an absolute blinder and it became one of the most talked-about films of the year a few weeks ago. I first encountered it when I saw a trailer in the cinema that made me so scared I had to stare at my feet for its last twenty seconds instead of looking at the screen. Something about that trailer wormed its way into my brain, and for a couple of weeks I couldn’t get away from the film – headlines proclaiming it was “the scariest film of the decade” and so on. I used to never watch horror films because I am a sensitive soul, but a few years ago I went to see Hereditary in the cinema and spent the entire evening crying and holding my breath and occasionally making weird, guttural sounds from my throat or whispering things like “No no no!” I couldn’t deny that when I left the cinema, I did so feeling cleansed. “So this is what horror is for,” I said to myself. “It makes you fall back in love with life. After all, my mother is not a demon banging her head on the ceiling.”

I’d spent a few years chasing the feeling I’d got from Hereditary by experimenting with some other horror films, but none of them felt quite the same. And then the Longlegs trailer came, and I thought “Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the one that will really get under my skin.” So I went to see it, and can confidently report that Longlegs is one of the stupidest films I’ve ever seen in my life, and the marketing team deserve the biggest bonus in the world for making it look as good as they did. My review will simply take the form of a description of the film’s plot, but bear in mind that this will be full of spoilers, so only read it if you’ve already seen Longlegs, or have no interest in it.

SPOILERS FOR LONGLEGS FOLLOW

And with that aside, join me as I try to work out what the hell was going on in this film:

In 1973, a nine-year-old girl sees a stranger’s car outside her house, and goes for a walk in the snow to find out who it is. She bumps into Nicolas Cage, but we can only see the bottom half of his face, with his eyes and the top of his head out of frame so we can’t really see what he looks like. Those who have seen or read much about the film will know that Nicolas Cage’s appearance has been completely hidden in the trailers and marketing, in order to create hype and make people spend the first half of the film wondering what Nicolas Cage is going to look like (spoiler – he looks a bit like Nicolas Cage). Weirdly, Nicolas Cage seems to be aware of the fact that his eyes and the top of his head are not in frame, because he says “Woops, I put my long legs on today” and then crouches down so we can see his face for one microsecond before it cuts to the opening credits. Presumably what we don’t see is the girl then saying “I could see you fine, why did you crouch down by about six inches, that barely changed anything?” and Nicolas Cage replying “Yes, but the top of my head wasn’t in shot.” Anyway, it’s never really explained why Nicolas Cage’s character seems to have a metafictional awareness of when he is and isn’t in frame (although he usually isn’t), so basically don’t worry about it.

Twenty years later, it’s the mid-90s (we know it’s the 90s because one character has a framed painting of Bill Clinton prominently displayed in his office, as so many people did back then, you couldn’t move for them at my place) and the little girl is now Lee Harker, an FBI agent. She’s on a manhunt on a suburban street and gets a weird feeling that a murderer is in one of the houses. She tells her partner to knock on the door of the house she thinks might contain a murderer. A murderer answers the door and immediately murders her partner, so she arrests him. Any potential feelings of guilt or complicity she might feel around this guy’s death are glossed over, because she’s called in by her boss to undertake a test to see if she’s psychic. She answers eight of the questions in a way that suggests she’s psychic, and another eight in a way that isn’t psychic, so her boss concludes that she is “half psychic.” If you’re wondering how this interesting quirk will affect the plot, it doesn’t really come up again, but it does cause her to occasionally hallucinate about snakes.

Impressed by having a half-psychic agent, Lee’s boss assigns her to a 20-year-old cold case concerning a series of family murder-suicides. All the families were massacred by the father, who then killed himself, because what’s a horror movie unless it prominently foregrounds the violent slaughter of women by men? However, coded letters signed “Longlegs” were found at all the scenes, and the handwriting doesn’t belong to anyone in the family, so that proves that they were actually all murdered by someone else, even though I’m not sure that necessarily follows on logically. Lee even asks her boss to explain how this follows on logically, and he says “I dunno, Longlegs must have made them all kill themselves or something” and asks her to solve it for him.

Lee works late looking at codes and reading books about the Devil and sticking some pieces of paper to the wall, and laying some other pieces of paper out on the floor, until eventually she falls asleep on the floor next to the paper, exhausted from all the paper she’s been moving around. Her boss wakes her up and says “Come and watch me drink and talk to me,” (actual line from the film) and she goes with him to a bar. She gives the briefest of overviews of what she’s found out, saying “Longlegs isn’t physically present at any of the murder scenes, so he must have murdered them all remotely,” which really isn’t advancing the hypothesis much further than it was before he gave the case to her. Her boss then gets up and goes “Whoa, I’m really drunk and it’s bedtime,” which suggests he had actually been sat there drinking for a while, even though what we just saw Lee say sounded like the start of their conversation. Presumably she just sat in silence for an hour or so and watched him drink, as per his request, paralysed with embarrassment at the fact that she had come up with nothing more substantial than “He must have murdered them remotely,” before she could bear the tension no longer and decided to start talking.

She drives her boss home, where he says “Come in and meet my wife and kid.” Lee asks if she has to and he says “Yes.” The reason why she has to is because they come back at the end of the film, so we have to meet them at some point, but really, I can’t fathom any reason why he would realistically feel such a compelling need to introduce one of his colleagues to his family in the middle of the night. Anyway, Lee meets his daughter, who asks her to come to her birthday party. I remember when I was a kid and my parents woke me up in the middle of the night to introduce me to their work colleagues – the first thing I wanted to do was to invite that work colleague to my birthday party, so it was great to see this moment of truthful character motivation.

When Lee gets home, she gets a call from her thinly characterised mum. On two separate occasions in the film, Lee starts a phone call with her mum by saying “It’s me, Lee, still your only daughter.” They often say in screenwriting that you should find ways of communicating really crucial bits of information twice, in case someone misses it the first time, and I feel that tidbit may have been taken a smidge literally in this film. Lee hangs up after someone bangs loudly on her door and then she looks out of her window and sees a mysterious figure in the woods. As we all would in this situation, Lee uses her common sense to go outside alone into the dark woods to look for the figure. When she returns home empty-handed, she finds that Longlegs entered her house while she was out and has left a letter addressed to her on her desk. Knowing that a wanted serial killer knows her name and where she lives and is potentially still in her house, Lee sits down to solve a puzzle written on the back of the letter. Longlegs has helpfully provided a key to the code he writes his letters in, so Lee is able to translate his letter and see that it is a threat to cut off her mum’s tits. “Charming!” she says directly into the camera, eyebrow raised. (Not really, but it’s fun to think what you’d do if you were playing a role).

Remembering that the daughters of all the murdered families had birthdays on the 14th, Lee draws some lines on a calendar to form a triangle, and shows it to her boss. Her boss asks what she wants him to do with this triangle, and she then adds that she has also worked out how to translate Longlegs’ code, which is probably what she should have led with. (Side note – from what we see of it, Longlegs’ code is a fairly basic cypher, with each letter of the alphabet consistently replaced with another symbol. These sorts of cyphers are routinely cracked by armchair puzzle solvers using a logical approach informed by the frequency of letters in Western alphabets, but in the 20 years the FBI has been working on this case, nobody managed to solve it until Longlegs got bored and literally told one of them how to do it). Translating the code, Lee and her boss chuck exposition at each other for a bit and eventually go to a farm in the middle of the night, where they find a mysterious porcelain doll.

They take the doll to a character who we only meet for one scene but who is given so much characterisation, almost as much as Lee gets in the entire movie. His main deal is that he loves the doll, he just gushes about how beautiful and well-made it is for a couple of minutes. It’s sort of implied that he works for the FBI, but all he does is talk about just how great this doll is and that it’s a work of art, so I don’t really know what his job is supposed to be. Maybe he’s the FBI’s main consultant on dolls? I dunno. Anyway, he tells them he cut open the doll’s head and found a weird metal ball in there. They ask him if he can cut that open, and he says “I could, but there’s nothing in there and it’s not going to contain any clues that will solve your case.” He then adds the caveat that when he put a microphone to it, he heard an evil voice say his ex-wife’s name over and over. I thought this was an amazing bit of dialogue, and revealed so much about the doll guy’s character, it would’ve been a really neat bit of writing if the film were a comedy. The guy’s got an ex-wife who he’s clearly really hung up on, he thinks that a Satanic voice repeating his ex-wife’s name over and over isn’t a significant clue – I wish I’d written it. This guy’s hilarious! Sadly, this film was trying to be scary. Anyway, he puts the microphone to the ball and it makes Lee hallucinate about snakes for a bit.

Meanwhile, Nicolas Cage buys some things from a shop, but covers up parts of his face with his hands so we still can’t see him properly, still boasting his preternatural ability to know what the camera can and can’t see at any given moment. He then drives home screaming “Daddy, mommy, save me from the hell of living!” just to make sure the film has a good Cage rage meme moment.

Lee goes to visit her mum again (she’s her only daughter, you see), and her mum tells her she’s got a trunk full of all her old things in her room. Lee goes to look in the trunk and finds a photo of Longlegs that she took when she met him as a kid. Do you remember that bit in Silence Of The Lambs where all the plot threads come together and Lecter helps Clarice to work out where she needs to go to find Buffalo Bill? Remember how it’s all really ingeniously and coherently plotted? Well, this is sort of like that, except here the main character just remembers that she once took a photo of the killer, finds the photo and goes “Oh yeah.” She has a flashback to when she met Longlegs as a kid and he sang a long, loud song. She gives the photo to her boss and they use it to launch a manhunt.

In the next scene, Longlegs (face now finally revealed to look like Nicolas Cage cosplaying as Catherine Tate’s Nan character) is waiting at a bus stop in the middle of a field when several SWAT vans and police cars drive up to him, sirens blaring, and place him under arrest. Yes, I’m also hazy on how the FBI went from having one 20-year-old Polaroid of the guy to having a full SWAT team tracking him down to a specific bus stop in the middle of nowhere, but hey, whatever, they got him. Lee watches a 24-minute video of Nicolas Cage singing “Happy birthday” in custody (we are spared the full 24 minutes, but I like that one of the only things we learn about this terrifying serial killer character is that he loves to sing long songs), and then goes in to meet him. She reminds him that he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison, which I wasn’t completely convinced by becauseal at this point none of them really know what he’s done and they certainly don’t have any evidence of whatever it is.

You might have heard a lot of talk around this film concerning Cage giving a performance unlike any you’ve ever seen him give before, but for the next five minutes, Cage gives the performance we’ve seen him give several times before (it’s a great performance! I always love seeing it again), spouts some nonsense and then bangs his head on the table so hard that his nose comes off and he dies. Lee goes to visit her mum, who murders another one of her partners and reveals that she has been Longlegs’ accomplice since 1973. Here’s where it gets silly (and if you’re wondering how this can be the point where it gets silly, then really you must see this film) – Longlegs has been living in Lee’s mum’s basement for 20 years, somehow going undetected by Lee despite the fact that one of the only things we know about him is that he loves to sing very loudly. He spent that time making dolls that contain evil balls that have been cursed by the Devil so that they cause fathers to murder their families and then kill themselves. No reason is given for this, it’s just Satan or something, it’s what Satan likes. Lee’s mum would dress up as a nun and appear at the houses of these families and say “Congratulations, you’ve won a doll from the church” and the family would for some reason accept this doll instead of, say, killing it with fire on sight, and then they would all murder each other.

Quite how nobody in the history of this 20-year-old cold case had noticed that a mysterious life-sized doll that resembled one of the daughters had been found at every single crime scene, and that each of these dolls contained a ball that whispers your ex-wife’s name and makes you think about snakes, is a bit of an oversight on the part of the FBI as far as I’m concerned. Another oversight is that Lee suddenly realises it’s her boss’s daughter’s birthday party, because it’s the 14th. Honestly, if I was an FBI chief investigating a serial killer who murdered families whose daughters had birthdays on the 14th, and had already demonstrated that he had personal knowledge of some of the agents investigating the case, and my daughter’s birthday was on the 14th, I’d probably have increased my family’s security or something, or had them moved, or I dunno, done anything.

Lee gets to the birthday party, which turns out to just be her boss, his wife, their daughter and her mum. I’m fuzzy on this – at the point that the daughter invited Lee to her birthday party, she wasn’t yet under the influence of any Satanic cult, so she was planning an actual birthday party. Was this the birthday party she planned? The only person she invited was her dad’s friend from work who turned up at her house one time at gone midnight? What a sad little life. Anyway, Lee’s mum has delivered a doll that looks like the daughter and everyone’s acting weird. I nearly tore my hair out at how stupid this scene was, so here goes:

Lee’s boss starts looking at his wife and practically licking his lips and saying things like “I’m going to get something to CUT the CAKE” and she says “I’ll come with you and we’ll be right back” and he says “I’ll be right back, you won’t” (this is all actual dialogue from “the scariest film of the decade”). Lee watches this all in silence, then watches them go to the kitchen and listens to her boss chop up his wife. She doesn’t say or do anything. I mean, I get that there’s all sorts of Satanic stuff going on and everyone feels weird or whatever, but, I dunno – just shoot him in the knee or something? Before he leaves? Say “Sorry, boss, I’m pretty certain you were going to chop up your wife because of this evil doll.” Anyway, she waits until the woman is dead (classic horror movie), then shoots him and kills him, then shoots her mum. Then it cuts to Nicolas Cage in his cell blowing us a kiss, then it’s the end.

I thought it was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen in my life, but hey, give that marketing team a raise.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – If you were one of the lovely people who came to my show at the Berlin Fringe yesterday, then do check out some of the shows at the Comedy Cafe over the rest of the week! There’s some great stuff on, and I already really love this festival.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – Miranda and I made a new sketch/short with superstar DoP Max Brill and comedy heroes Christian Brighty and Sooz Kempner, and Sooz’s delivery line of a line about jambalaya made me laugh so hard every time she did it. Watch this space for the short!

Book Of The Week – Just finishing off Sally Howard’s The Home Stretch, which is about equitable distribution of household labour between genders. It made me reflect a lot on the idea of “learned incompetence,” which is the male tendency to avoid some housework tasks because “they’re just not good at it.” Miranda and I are pretty equal in what we do at home – she does the laundry, I cook and tidy, we both clean – but this has made me realise that when I do help with the laundry, I do a lot of “I’m rubbish at putting on duvet covers, I have to get inside and wriggle around like a little grub,” and this book has made me decide to get my shit together and be a bit less thick. After all, when Miranda helps with the cooking, she doesn’t wave the knife around and stab herself in the head, she just does it because she is also a good cook, so maybe it’s time for me to get a good technique for duvet covers.

Album Of The Week – Diamond Mine by King Creosote & Jon Hopkins. I’ll be seeing both these guys at Green Man in a couple of weeks, so I thought I’d better listen to their collab album. It’s a collection of really lovely folk songs by King Creosote, with very subtle ambient treatments by Hopkins. It’s absolutely beautiful.

Film Of The Week – Not seen any films since Longlegs. Been too busy trying to work out what the hell was going on in Longlegs.

That’s all for this week! As ever, if you enjoy the newsletter and would like to recommend it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it! Take care of yourselves until next time, and all the best,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they give to you, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated.

PPS Here is a photo of a lovely bridge in Berlin, just to prove I am having a nice time. How could I not have a nice time, with bridges like this??

Click here to go back