Longlegs (2024)

Osgood Perkins has built a film that behaves like a horror picture and thinks like a police procedural, which is to say it moves slowly, speaks softly, and lets the dread do the talking. Lee Harker, the rookie agent at its center, is a woman with a gun and a gift, though the screenplay presents her abilities as clairvoyance instead of a diagnosis. She is damaged, withdrawn, and unnervingly good at reading what others cannot. The film never converts any of this into a statement about women in law enforcement. It is too busy being frightening. Her mother, we eventually learn, is the accomplice, which does little for the sisterhood.

The supporting cast includes a Black supervisor and an Asian agent, and both perform their duties without the screenplay ever acknowledging their existence as anything but personnel. Race is not a subject here. The villain's androgynous presentation drew accusations of transphobia from queer outlets, a controversy the director declined to litigate in detail. There is no affirmative queer content in the film. There is no environmental parable, no critique of wealth, no commentary on body image, and no rewriting of history. The Oregon of 1994 is period texture, deployed for atmosphere.

The residue is a faint reading of the protagonist as neurodivergent, an interpretation the film invites and then declines to confirm, since the explanation it prefers is Satan. The film never stops to instruct. It has no lesson, no message, no moral to deliver at the end of the tunnel. It simply stares at a doll and waits for the audience to blink first. In an era of cinema that frequently mistakes a thesis for a third act, this restraint registers as almost quaint. Bleak, patient, and entirely uninterested in improving anybody.