‘Longlegs’ haunting ending, defined

How are you feeling after seeing Longlegs? Unsettled? Spooked? Such as you’ve acquired the enamel of the hydra upon you?

That is greater than comprehensible. The most recent movie from author/director Osgood Perkins is filled with eerie ambiance, Silence of the Lambs–fashion serial killer investigations, Devil worship, and a stunning variety of references to the glam rock band T. Rex. All this results in an ending that crawls beneath your pores and skin — and will go away you with some questions alongside the way in which. From killer nuns to satanic symbols, let’s break down Longlegs and its ending.

What’s the primary thriller of Longlegs?

Longlegs facilities on the FBI’s investigation of a decades-long serial killing spree in Oregon. The victims are at all times households who’ve died by murder-suicide, however there are widespread threads between every incident that counsel there’s an evil mastermind at work. First, the deceased households all have daughters whose birthdays fall on the 14th of the month. And second, the killer at all times leaves messages written in cryptic code on the crime scene, signed with the identify “Longlegs.”

Since there isn’t any different proof of Longlegs’ (Nicolas Cage) presence on the crime scene, the FBI needs to learn how he is capable of apparently orchestrate killings from afar — or who his confederate could also be. Enter Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a “half-psychic” FBI Agent.

Lee cracks Longlegs’ cipher utilizing a Bible verse from a birthday card he left at her home. She additionally realizes that the dates of the killings, when positioned on a calendar grid, type a satanic sample. The one date wanted to complete the picture is the thirteenth, so the race is on to seek out Longlegs earlier than he strikes once more.

The investigation takes a doll-centric flip.

Longlegs’ decoded letters direct Lee and her supervisor, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), to the Digital camera household farm, the positioning of the primary Longlegs homicide. There, they discover a life-size doll that appears disturbingly just like the Cameras’ daughter, Carrie Anne (Kiernan Shipka), who’s the only real survivor of the assault. The doll appears principally regular, other than a black orb in its mind that appears to whisper to Lee.

Lee and Carter go to Carrie Anne in a psychiatric hospital, the place she’s been catatonic for years. But on the day Lee and Carter found the doll, she wakened — and acquired a wierd customer who used Lee’s identify to sign up for visitation. Lee’s ensuing dialogue with Carrie Anne reveals that Carrie Anne continues to be very dedicated to Longlegs, and that she’d do something he advised her to do.

Mom is aware of finest.

Lee visits her mom, Ruth (Alicia Witt), who at all times encourages Lee to say her prayers for cover and who has stored all of Lee’s issues. Amongst this stuff is a stack of Polaroids Lee took that features a picture of Longlegs himself. Seems, the younger lady Longlegs spoke to within the movie’s chilling prologue was Lee, whose personal birthday falls on Jan. 14. However how did she and her mom survive his intrusion?

The reality involves gentle not lengthy after the FBI makes use of Lee’s photograph to seize Longlegs. In an interrogation with Lee, he tells her to ask her mom about attainable accomplices. He then smashes his head open on the desk and dies. We additionally study that Carrie Anne Digital camera has died by suicide on the psychiatric hospital. Since it is the thirteenth of the month, her demise completes Longlegs’ sample, explains what he should have directed her to do when he visited her, and closes up one of many solely leads the FBI nonetheless had on the murders.

Now that Ruth is nicely and really the FBI’s final lead on the case, Lee and Agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) head again to see her. However what’s this? It is a nun with a shotgun!

Ruth, wearing a full nun’s behavior, kills Browning. Then she turns her gun on a lifelike doll that appears identical to a younger Lee, shattering the ball inside. Black smoke dissipates from the true Lee’s head, and he or she faints. Now that Lee’s free from the doll’s spell, Ruth recounts her relationship with Longlegs within the type of a warped fairy story.

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Lee’s mom has been working with Longlegs all alongside.

As Ruth tells Lee, the day Longlegs visited their home, Ruth begged him to spare Lee’s life. In return, she promised to assist him perform the remainder of his satanic mission.

Longlegs — really named Dale Cobble — is a twisted dollmaker whose Devil-possessed dolls drive individuals to homicide each other. Nevertheless, in addition they distract the daughters of every household, entrancing them so they do not know what’s coming till it is too late.

How do the dolls get to every household? That is the place Ruth is available in. She poses as a nun from the native church and tells the eventual victims that they’ve gained the doll in a contest. (Let this at all times be a reminder to look a present doll within the mouth.) As soon as the doll is inside the house, its satanic work begins.

Since Lee did not die, her doll served a unique objective all through her childhood. It stored her from seeing Longlegs and her mom’s involvement with him, to the purpose that she missed him dwelling and crafting his dolls of their basement. Earlier within the movie, Longlegs says he works for “the man downstairs,” aka Devil. However for Lee, he turns into “the man downstairs” in his personal proper.

The doll’s affect is probably going the explanation Lee has psychic instinct within the first place. Plus, we have seen it haunting her all through the film within the type of a darkish, horned determine harking back to Devil himself. Its shadowy type calls to thoughts the darkish smoke we see go away Lee’s head as soon as her doll’s orb is destroyed, suggesting it is the manifestation of the powers inside the doll.

Longlegs has one final birthday trick up his sleeve.

Longlegs could also be useless, however he and Ruth aren’t completed with Lee simply but. Upon receiving a name that she’s “late to the party,” Lee realizes Carter’s daughter, Ruby (Ava Kelders), was born on the 14th, and is Longlegs’ final goal. Ruby invited Lee to her party towards the beginning of the film, so Longlegs has been constructing as much as this for a very long time. Nonetheless, the conclusion takes the movie’s dread into overdrive — and it would not let up for the remainder of its runtime.

On the Carters’ home, we see that Ruth has already gifted them the doll, and its results are kicking in. Lee watches, helpless, as Carter grows chilly and irritable, proper on the sting of snapping. He invitations his spouse, Anna (Carmel Amit) to the kitchen to assist reduce the cake. Sounds of violence ring out as he murders her offscreen, however Ruby is simply too entranced by the doll to note her dad and mom’ demise.

Lee shoots a still-homicidal Carter in addition to her mom, however her gun runs empty simply earlier than she will shoot the doll. A easy coincidence? Or an act of satanic intervention? Both means, Lee can not convey herself to destroy the doll. We linger on her horrified face earlier than chopping to a flashback of Longlegs in his interrogation room, the place he sings his personal threatening tackle “Happy Birthday,” buttoned up with a “Hail Satan!” for good measure.

What does Longlegs‘ ending imply?

Longlegs leaves Lee’s precise destiny up within the air: Will she overcome the demonic presence inside the doll and destroy it another means? Or will she succumb to its powers and change into a pawn in Longlegs, Ruth, and Devil’s final ploy? Longlegs’ remaining, gleeful “Hail Satan!” suggests the latter is extra seemingly, that the evil lingers on.

However there’s extra to Longlegs‘ ending than that. Assume again to Longlegs’ nasty rendition of “Happy Birthday,” to the important thing position birthdays play in his plan, to the truth that all of the daughters of the murdered households had been so younger. The movie’s preoccupation with younger ladies growing old and rising up is vital to its darkness.

When Lee first meets Ruby, she asks a couple of stuffed animal-filled swing in Ruby’s room. Ruby expresses derision for it, saying Carter retains it round so Ruby will not develop up too quick. There is a related sense of parental intervention with Ruth’s hoarding of all of Lee’s outdated issues: Should you hold the remnants of your youngsters’s youth round, that youth will not ever really go away, proper?

Longlegs’ dolls take that up a notch. Not solely are they an emblem of childhood, they’re additionally twisted effigies of the victims as youngsters. And in distracting the daughters from their dad and mom’ violence, the dolls additionally hold them locked in childlike ignorance till the tip of their lives.

So what occurs when one of many dolls’ victims stays alive? You get Lee, who is not completely blinded to the evils of the world — do not forget that first serial killer? — however who’s definitely blinded to the evil inside her own residence. Solely when Ruth shoots Lee’s doll do her eyes open to that evil. In that second, she positive factors a greater understanding of why her mother was so smothering and so insistent on her saying her prayers. The sudden burst of context appears like a belated coming-of-age for Lee, a remaining stripping away of the veneers of a troubled childhood.

With that in thoughts, consider Longlegs’ final “Happy Birthday” as an acknowledgment of Lee’s new, “grown-up” understanding of her life to that time. I can consider no worse birthday current than discovering out my mother has been in league with the literal satan.

Longlegs is now in theaters.