Longlegs needed one more scene

Speaking to Polygon ahead of the horror thriller film’s release, Long legsWriter-director Oz Perkins discussed how he arrived at the film’s ending: “I think if I could tell people one thing, it’s like, ‘You just have to keep showing up and doing it and tinkering with it, and turning it around and tinkering with it some more, and see if you can…’ You know, like a crossword puzzle. ‘I’m pretty sure 9 is wide That.’ Then you start filling in 8. You just build it up and massage it and stay with it, stay with it.”

While this describes how he wrote the film, it also applies to us, watching the film and trying to figure out what to think of it. Long legs ends in a place that guaranteed to launch argumentsbut it lacks the kind of fuel that makes ambiguous endings exciting to discuss. It feels like one more scene was needed, not to dissolve his story, but to give us all more productive ways to deal with it. Let’s talk about what that ending does and doesn’t offer, and whether Perkins’ “keep tinkering with it” process paid off.

(Editorial note: End of spoilers for Long legs.)

What happens at the end of Longlegs?

In the film, newly minted FBI agent and apparent psychic Lee Harker (modern horror stalwart Maika Monroe) is assigned to the bureau’s biggest mystery: a series of mass murders committed by fathers who slaughter their families and then commit suicide. Lee eventually discovers that the mysterious figure Longlegs (Nicolas Cage, unrecognizable under heavy prosthetics), who has been leaving coded messages at the crime scenes, has been creating dolls imbued with some sort of satanic essence that takes control of entire families, triggering the murders.

When Lee compares her psychic flashes to her own childhood memories, she realizes who the killer is and sends the FBI to catch him. But he commits suicide in custody by repeatedly slamming his head into a hard surface — just like the possessed killer does in David Lynch’s Twin Peaksone of Perkins’ most beloved sources of inspiration.

Lee then discovers that her mother Ruth (Twin Peaks alum Alicia Witt) has been Longlegs’ accomplice, delivering the dolls to his targets. Ruth agreed to the deal to prevent Satan from claiming Lee, who had been given one of the dolls as a child. Ruth destroys Lee’s doll with a shotgun blast, and we see clouds of darkness disappear from both the doll’s head and Lee’s, suggesting that her hold is gone, and that perhaps other victims can be saved in the same way by destroying their dolls.

Lee passes out, but when she regains consciousness, she finds that the newest doll is headed for the home of her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), and his young daughter Ruby, whom Lee met earlier in the film. She rushes to their house, only to find the entire family already under the doll’s influence, and Ruth sitting by to witness the killings that normally follow, as her pact with Longlegs requires. After an undue amount of hesitation, allowing Carter to kill his wife in the kitchen and then chase after Ruby, Lee finally shoots both her mother and Carter, then turns to shoot the doll as well – but she’s either out of bullets or her gun simply won’t fire at the doll.

And then the movie just ends, on what should have been a tense, meaningful moment, an ambiguous end point leaving the audience feeling uncertain about the mysterious future.

What’s wrong with the ending of Longlegs?

Except… there’s almost no sense of menace from that future. Longlegs is dead and won’t be producing any more puppets. Ruth is dead and won’t be delivering them. Satan will presumably stick around as usual and find other minions, but it seems like the immediate threat has been contained. The puppet is inert—even if Lee’s gun not firing is meant to suggest that the puppet still has some kind of control over the world, that’s a pretty small power. Maybe the gun’s failure is meant to seem scary, mysterious, suggestive of a greater power at work and more trials to come. But the feeling just doesn’t register, given Lee and Ruby’s blankness and lack of reaction.

The ending leaves behind some subtler, creepier questions. Now that Lee’s own doll is broken and that black cloud of evil is gone, does she still have psychic powers? Is there a future in which she continues to hunt down Satan-worshipping killers and keep his influence in the world at bay? (This is the kind of storyline that seems designed to fuel a 12-book horror-thriller series.) Given that Ruth effectively sacrificed her own soul to protect Lee, will the devil finally come for Lee now that Ruth is gone and the pact is broken?

Or did destroying her doll solve the problem? If the latter is true, why didn’t Ruth try it literally decades ago? Or if Ruth didn’t think breaking the doll wouldn’t work—which she apparently didn’t, since she still dutifully delivered the Carters’ evil doll—why did she try it in the present?

What the End of Longlegs Needed

There’s just so much we don’t know about the connection between the dolls and the children they’re brought to, and those same questions haunt Ruby’s relationship with her own doll. Given the number of classic thrillers Perkins drew on for Long legsit’s tempting to read this ending as the end of The ringand imagine a future where Lee can only protect Ruby from Satan by following in Ruth’s footsteps and continuing to pass on the curse. At the very least, she’ll have to find a new dollmaker or learn a lot about porcelain molding very quickly.

But we just don’t know enough about Lee to know how protective she feels of Ruby, or how she would handle a crisis that challenges her ethics. Powerful, effective ambiguous endings — in John Sayles’ Limbofor example, or one of the iterations of Guardsin comics, movies, or TV — are firmly rooted in the world’s design or the characters’ identities. We don’t know for sure which of the survivors at the end of John Carpenter’s The thing could be an alien. But we know the rules the alien plays by, and how the surviving characters have dealt with them thus far. And we can easily understand the threats of the freezing cold, the lack of shelter, the lack of trust, and the danger of the alien infecting the world. It’s easy to wrap your head around the pregnant moment where Carpenter ends, and speculate about all the ways the balance could tip.

Lee, on the other hand, is an enigma and she is stuck in a world where the rules are unclear and her reaction is unpredictable. She is an odd figure: her long pauses, frequent lack of emotional affection, unusual choices, and peculiar way of expressing herself make her seem alienated and unbalanced. This way of behaving may be a reaction to the trauma of her childhood, or to the constant terror that her visions instill in her life. If those visions were gone by the influence of the doll, it is difficult to say what her life would be like now, or what choices she might make.

So “Well, here we are with three corpses and a doll” seems like a bad place to end the story, with only a beat or two. It’s not like Perkins needed Lee to deliver a monologue (or God help us all, the dreaded voice-over summary) explaining who she is now or who she wants to be. Ambiguity and open-endedness are fine qualities for a dark thriller to embrace, and in a story built so tightly around the unknown power and presence of a demonic force, it makes sense to walk away still wondering what parts of the characters’ histories Perkins deliberately left out.

It’s just that there are so many terrifying directions for this story to go beyond that point, and the film doesn’t tease any of them or capitalize on the sense of dread and helplessness that Perkins has spent so much time building. We don’t know if Ruby is still possessed, if Lee’s powers are gone, if there’s still a demonic force attached to any of them, and whether Longlegs is right when he claims that Satan will simply give him more power after he dies and that he’ll be “everywhere.” Maybe that’s what his echoing “Hail Satan!” at the end of the film is supposed to suggest, but it’s presented with such ambiguity — is he speaking, or is this just an audio echo the audience hears, for irony’s sake? — that it lacks any emotional power.

I don’t have a specific agenda for the ending. I’m not saying that Perkins specifically needed Ruby to stab Lee, or that Lee needed to continue the bloodbath where Agent Carter left off, or anything like that. I just wanted the ending to maintain the threat that Perkins was piling on all along, with some sense of what the new state of affairs is, or how these characters feel about what’s happened. Leaving it all in a state of empty, opaque emptiness is death to the imagination. Given a framework for a story, the audience is willing to go to great lengths to fill in the gaps with their own theories and hopes. But Long legs doesn’t even give us that framework, just a bewildered “Is that it?” uncertainty.

Perhaps Perkins is simply trying to stoke curiosity about what happens next, and save room for a sequel. But fans ask for a sequel when they’re excited and shocked about where a story ends, when they’re left with a sense of anticipation and curiosity. Because they don’t know anything about what happens to Lee, Ruby, the doll, Satan, or anything else in the film at the end of the film, it’s hard to feel that emotional connection to the story. Maybe this film just didn’t have long enough legs.