The Man Downstairs

Osgood Perkins’ fourth directorial effort, Longlegs, debuted to critical acclaim and box office success, due in part to an incredibly creative and savvy marketing campaign that created a “want to see” factor that pulled people off their couches and into theaters. That’s notable in and of itself, but that would simply be a quickly forgotten anomaly if the film didn’t deliver. Thankfully, the movie impresses on every level. Perkins has taken everything that worked from his previous films and consolidated that into Longlegs, which exudes the confidence of an artist in full command of his gifts.

Let’s dive into the sanguinary machinations of the film, using its own chapter headings to discuss structure and dialogue, scene highlights, film technique, and finally, performances and conclusions. This presumes readers have seen the movie, so this essay necessarily will be spoiler-heavy. If you haven’t seen it, you may wish to flee from the demonic details that follow.

HIS LETTERS

Prior to the first scene, lyrics from the 1971 T. Rex song “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” are used as an epigraph onscreen: “You’re dirty and sweet, oh yeah; Well, you’re slim and you’re weak; You’ve got the teeth of the hydra upon you; You’re dirty, sweet and you’re my girl.” In the context of this story, the “you” being discussed is the main character, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), and the “me” is either Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) or the Devil (as Himself). The quotation mentions both that “the teeth of the hydra” are upon her (i.e., she is ensnared in terrible danger), and that she’s already been claimed by an evil entity. Of course, we don’t know this when we initially see the epigraph, but its meaning becomes more evident upon a second viewing or while enjoying the irresistible song over the end credits.

The opening sequence, a 1970s Oregon flashback, is prime Perkins atmosphere–an isolated snowy setting, wan winter light that somehow seems oppressive even as it illuminates, all in the curtailed framing of an old home movie. A young girl, whom we don’t yet know is young Lee, walks outside to investigate the arrival of a station wagon in front of her home. As she stands in the snow, looking around, she hears a high-pitched voice say: “Cuckoo.” (A symbolic note: many species of cuckoos are known as “brood parasites,” which place their own eggs in other birds’ nests. The cuckoo hatchling then evicts the other baby birds, not unlike what Longlegs does with the occult dolls he has placed in his victims’ homes.) Young Lee turns to encounter the looming form of the strange, obscurely threatening Longlegs. The shot is framed so we never see his eyes, which adds to the sense of menace and mystery (and apparently makes it infinitely meme-able on social media). He speaks in a weirdly shrill voice and refers to Lee as the “almost birthday girl.” He says, “It seems I wore my long legs today. What happens if…” He leans down suddenly toward young Lee, and smash cut to titles.

The audience is immediately hooked and unnerved, but that’s just an amuse-bouche; Perkins is moving on. In the 1990s, Lee is now a member of an FBI task force enjoined to search for a serial killer that has been active for two decades. Once a year, the father of a family kills his wife, children and then himself. There is no sign of anyone else having been at the scene of the crime. However, at the site of each murder there is always a letter written in an arcane-looking code with the word LONGLEGS at the bottom. Lee and her partner are sent to search door-to-door, when Lee suddenly gets a strong feeling that the killer is in one particular house. Her partner, not taking this hunch very seriously, knocks at the door, which opens, the occupant within immediately shooting and killing Lee’s partner. It’s a genuinely shocking moment, throwing the audience into the action of the story sooner than we might have expected. This all happens within the first 10 minutes of the film; the filmmakers aren’t messing around. Notice has been given: It’s always Anything Can Happen Day.

Perkins deliberately wrongfoots the audience by superficially utilizing The Silence of the Lambs tropes to get its guard down by convincing it that it’s familiar with this type of story and knows what to expect. It does this much in the same way that 1987’s Angel Heart used the trappings of film noir to conceal the fact that it was the story of a literally damned soul trying to evade his hellish fate. Lee spends the bulk of the story trying to discover the identity of the elusive Longlegs, only to find that he has been living in her childhood home with her and her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) for most of her life. Due to a spell being cast on her by one of Longlegs’ dolls, she is unable to see him until he finally allows himself to be perceived, once he turns himself in to the police. Longlegs says he’s working for “the man downstairs,” referring to the Devil, but he’s also literally living downstairs from Lee.

We see more of the flashback scene later, in which Ruth confronts and is subdued by Longlegs. He gives her a terrible choice: to save Lee’s life, she has to agree to transport his occult dolls into the homes of his proscribed victims and make sure that the desired murders occur. Decades later, Lee discovers that the dates of the murders on a chart form a demonic sigil, signifying a rite that is slowly being enacted. But the other thing the flashback connotes is marking the day that Longlegs moved into Lee’s home and took over the life of her family. The structure of the film–pretending to be one thing but actually being another, using camera, plot and dialogue tricks to conceal itself–matches its content with diabolic skill.

Perkins employs a surprising amount of humor in his script, including the message of one of the decoded letters (for a dead family discovered months after their murders): DOWN LOW TOO SLOW. He gives the funniest line of the film to his real-life daughter, Bea, who plays a teenage supermarket clerk unimpressed with Longlegs’ weird affectations, yelling, “Dad, that gross guy is back again!” The humor gets darker in a scene in which a possessed husband tells his wife to go to the kitchen with him, where he clearly intends to kill her. She asks if they’re both going to come back soon, and he chillingly responds, “No, I’ll be right back. You’ll still be in the kitchen.”

Perkins knows that dialogue can add incalculably in building up an atmosphere of rising dread. Ruth, who has committed blasphemy by helping murder the families while dressing as and pretending to be a nun, expresses harsh despair about having exhorted Lee to pray all her life: “Our prayers don’t help us. Prayers don’t do a goddamned thing.” Carrie (Kiernan Shipka), the last survivor of a murdered family and catatonic for years before Longlegs awakens her, delivers an eerie, numbed monologue that includes this description of jumping off a building into welcome suicide: “Just happy as peaches to watch the ground as it come up to meet me.” And finally, there’s this speech from Longlegs himself, describing how to do the important work of The Man Downstairs: “Bow down, bow all the way down. And get right down, to the dirty, dirty work. Work that gets dirty as it cleans, like a mop, like a ra-aa-aag.”

ALL OF YOUR THINGS

The creepy and cryptic opening flashback sequence is instantly a classic, but there are other moments or stylistic choices that raise Longlegs to the level of greatness. A couple of them are the scenes with Carrie’s speech and with Longlegs’ interrogation, but as those are largely performance-based, I’ll cover them in the next section. One related bit preceding the interrogation scene is worth mentioning, however. Lee and several other officers are watching a previously recorded video of Longlegs speaking on a monitor, and as he speaks, he points to several people in the current room, even though he had no way of knowing they’d be there. It’s a subtly disquieting moment, one of the first suggestions that this strange man may indeed have supernatural abilities.

The discovery of the doll in the attic of Carrie’s family home is another scene which helps build the sense of pervasive evil. Lee and her FBI supervisor enter the dark, dusty room and discover a cross nailed to a board on the floor. Upon prying the board up, they discover a box inside a small hidden chamber. The supervisor opens the lid of the box, revealing the form of a young girl inside curled into a fetal posture. At first it seems that they’ve discovered an actual girl, but it’s quickly apparent that it’s one of Longlegs’ lifelike dolls. This is startling enough, but later when we find the influence of the doll is what’s been keeping Carrie catatonic for years and turning her mind towards the dark, the moment has more impact–this might as well be her corpse.

Perkins uses quick images of writhing snakes to represent Lee recognizing Longlegs’ work or proximity, which is an effective tool to ramp up the tension in any given scene, but he does something else that is considerably more clever and harder to notice on a first viewing. In many shots, Lee has the shadow of what presumably is the Devil behind her, horns and all, but the second one might see it, it’s gone. This is the kind of thing that fans will ferret out and post screen caps of online once the film is available to own, but for now it’s just another thread in a tapestry of unease. This isn’t the first time that Perkins has used this technique–his first film, the excellent The Blackcoat’s Daughter, featured a recurring demonic shadow as well.

Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi create an environment of low light and muted colors that works with the winter settings to deliver a feeling of cold isolation. Whereas in Daughter Perkins experimented with levels of darkness, in Longlegs he seems to imply that the light in Lee’s life is at best weak and can offer no protection. Darkness underlies everything. As a director, Perkins favors minimal camera motion, instead displaying open spaces behind his main character or long shots of empty hallways and rooms, ratcheting up tension for an audience trained to expect ubiquitous jump scares. Eugenio Battaglia’s intricate sound design, a disquieting mixture of creaking floorboards, clattering industrial noises and barely discernible human speech, combines brilliantly with Zilgi’s (Elvis Perkins) score to provide the movie with a strong undercurrent of aural anxiety.

BIRTHDAY GIRLS

Lee is withdrawn and damaged from the first time we see her as an adult, the victim of a demonic spell she doesn’t even know exists. Monroe convincingly portrays her as somebody uncomfortable with herself and others, with the underlying energy of an animal hiding from a predator. Witt excels as the protective, damned Ruth, seemingly harmless and benign as she witters on about the importance of prayer. But she’s in fact a blood-soaked angel of death, reminding her daughter of her own sacrifice for Lee’s life when our heroine complains of being treated like a child: “You’re not a child because you were allowed to grow up.”

Shipka, one of the stars of Daughter, memorably played a possessed girl in that film, and she still has that mojo workin’ in this similar role as Carrie. Her one scene, mostly in close shots curled up in a chair, succeeds as a combination of well-chosen dialogue distilled to its disturbing essence and a performance which seamlessly moves from a sense of numb victimhood to a revelation of willing corruption. After an initial feeling of sympathy for Carrie in her ordeal, we find that she actually wants to hurt people, is an enthusiastic follower of Longlegs, and would be just as content to jump off a roof (ultimately the use her masters find for her). It’s a superb piece of acting and a highlight of the movie.

If you’re hiring Nicolas Cage to play a wildly oddball satanic serial killer, you expect him to Cage it up and swing for the fences, and my friends, he does not disappoint. He looks and sounds like a malefic Tiny Tim (not the Dickens version), his skin so pale he reminded me of the vampire in Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos. Although he has a relatively small amount of screen time, the power of his performance is that Longlegs feels omnipresent; symbolically, he casts a long shadow. He makes the most of his appearances, especially in the later sections of the flashback sequence, answering Ruth’s angry questions with weird hand motions and screechy singing, as if he’s attempting to cast a homemade spell on her. It’s a very original and iconic portrayal that won’t be leaving my mind any time soon.

The ending of the film finds Lee saving a young girl from her possessed father and having to kill Ruth. She tries to shoot the doll that is affecting the girl, but either she’s out of bullets or some force is preventing her: The gun simply clicks instead of firing. Lee hesitates for a moment and then decides to leave with the girl. The meaning of that decision is left unclear. Why doesn’t she try to destroy the doll by other means? Is Lee giving up, or worse, going to become a new Ruth? It certainly doesn’t seem like a happy ending, and this is reinforced by the final shot, a cheery farewell from Longlegs, blowing us a kiss. Everything has gone just as The Man Downstairs has planned.

In my opinion, almost every character we meet in the story is doomed from the very beginning, unwilling and unknowing victims of a decades-spanning occult ritual. The only ones who have any real degree of free will are Longlegs and Ruth, and Ruth was compelled to participate to save Lee’s life. This explains Lee’s entire persona of uneasiness–she’s spent most of her life under a spell, but beneath that she knows that everything is terribly wrong. She’s the first and longest suffering of all the sacrificial “birthday girls,” and the final flourish of Longlegs’ ritual is Lee killing her own mother, the person who sacrificed her life (and presumably her soul) to protect her.

And there’s the final meaning. In this story, evil wins. The combined might of family, the FBI, and the actions of our heroine aren’t enough. Longlegs is a brilliantly crafted entertainment, dazzling on many levels, which I think will be appreciated for many years to come. The chill it delivers, however, is utterly, uncomfortably real.