“Imperfection is a bitch, but perfection is a monster”

Resistance and freedom are potent triggers for art, especially and perennially for the global south. But consequently, is it possible to ever be free of ourselves? After generations of struggling, does ridding the world from society and its oppressions truly equal peace or happiness? Set in a lone dystopian city, Ishan Shukla’s animated feature debut takes these questions by the horns with urban fantasy and biopunk kicks. While beautifully executed and innovative in its statements on conformity and revolt, “Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust”’ss stickler for adhering to traditional sci-fi and hero tropes leaves it dangling in unsatisfying clichés.

In a totalitarian city-state named Schirkoa, citizens are only known by numbers and alphabets and are made to wear paper bags over their heads in perpetuity. In praise of sameness, lauded by a religious figure named Lord’O, it is against the law to see and know your own or each other’s faces. Though inert and unwilling to change, councilman 197A (Shahbaz Sarwar, Tibu Fortes) grapples with his boredom and disillusionment in the city as he is being groomed to become a nominated member of parliament. One night, a spirited encounter with a wanted immigrant and ‘Anomalie’ 33F (Soko) changes his trajectory forever, bringing him beyond the borders of the city to communities on the fringe. Where no one wears paper bags, and citizens have gradually mutated in bodily and evolutionary revolt to suppression. In an underbelly city of fantastical hybrid creatures, centaurs, mermaids, horned faeries, 197A’s journeys take him towards freedom, but also towards a new existentialism.

With a structure not unlike “1984”, “Brazil” or “Blade Runner”, pessimistic heroism and devastation form the emotional cores of “Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust”. As the title suggests, the hero’s journey is poised for despondency in our unchangeable world, in the lies we trust in order to go on. Archetypes and tropes often find good solace in genre enthusiasts, especially in this blockbuster that seems to take punchy enjoyment in its classicalism. A torrent of worldbuilding details and textures, developed using both 2D and 3D animation, create a techno feast for the eyes. The classic government announcements, monuments, neon-drenched districts simmering with unrest, meld together to create a believable and immersive city of terror. It’s all we would expect. Similarly and unfortunately on the flip side, “Schirkoa”’s predictable and rushed character arcs, expositional dialogue and emotional beats stunt its overall impact. What seemed once to be groundbreaking in the futuristic sci-fi genre, the discovery that changing the world is futile, has lost most of its spark here.

Check the interview with the director

When I became a television critic for the Los Angeles Times, way back in early 2007, many people told me it was a Very Bad Idea. Why would I give up a job as a film writer to review TV? Didn’t I know “The Sopranos” was ending? And that, with a few notable exceptions, original scripted television was dead, murdered by reality TV and endless Internet content?

Mercifully, I listened to none of it; instead I was able to watch and write about one of the most stunning artistic revolutions of our time. The pendulum (and Hollywood’s penchant for excess) being what it is, television is now facing a financial crisis due, in large part, to that marvelous period of growth. But though the industry is in a belt-tightening phase, no one is predicting the demise of the art form altogether.

I think of television in 2007 every time a consortium of pundits calls time of death on anything. I certainly thought about it a month ago when so many people were announcing the demise of moviegoing.

In May, “The Fall Guy,” “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and “The Garfield Movie” failed to live up to prerelease expectations. Instead of questioning the wisdom of the expectations themselves, especially given crippling writers’ and actors’ strikes, the industry, and many of those who cover it, preferred to announce that the sky was falling.

“People just don’t want to go to the movies anymore,” is something more than one person said out loud and in public.

Then “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” “A Quiet Place: Day One” and especially “Inside Out 2” premiered and suddenly everyone was, and is, going to the movies again. The box office has roared to life and “Deadpool & Wolverine” isn’t even out yet.

As it turns out, people do still want to go to the movies. Maybe not in the same numbers they did before streaming made television self-curating and available 24/7, or before a global pandemic shuttered theaters for more than a year and studios decided to make films available for home viewing mere weeks after their theatrical release. “A Quiet Place: Day One” has already grossed more than $100 million globally in its first five days, this despite Paramount announcing a streaming date of July 30.

As that film and other June or July releases prove, when there’s something (and this is important) that people actually want to see, there they all are, talking and laughing and waiting in line to pay $17 for a ticket and $10 for a bucket of popcorn. I saw “Inside Out 2” a full week after its release and it took me almost a half-hour just to find parking.

After last year’s strikes, this summer may not manage to meet the magic of “Barbenheimer” or whatever yardstick analysts want to use. But that’s not the point.

The point is: Why have we become so anxious to pronounce time of death when the patient is clearly still breathing?

This country has endured quite a bit of trauma in recent years, but we are not doing ourselves any favors by continually leaping from “problem” to “end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it catastrophe” about everything. (Don’t even get me started about the post-presidential-debate rush to madness but subtext, subtext, subtext.)

Not only is it exhausting, and occasionally embarrassing, but our addiction to hyperbole makes it impossible to delineate the actual DEFCON-1 emergencies — the climate crisis, the unhoused crisis, internal threats to our democracy — from lesser problems.

That’s not to downplay the state of affairs in Hollywood. For those working in the entertainment industry, this current period of constriction is a very immediate and livelihood-threatening problem. But looking at the failure of a few movies as the bellwether of not just the state of film but the mind-set of billions is not just unhelpful, it has been proven, by recent history, to be completely bone-headed.

TV was dead until it wasn’t. The summer box office was dead except it’s not. Publishing had no future until Oprah started a book club and “Harry Potter” appeared. Oh, and remember how people told Taylor Swift she was in danger of ruining her career by “overexposure”?

There is both pathos and poetic justice in the fact that “Inside Out 2” is currently “saving” summer. Much of the story revolves around how terrible life is when Anxiety takes control; Anxiety only knows how to imagine worst-case scenarios and inevitably spins out trying to prevent them.

That doesn’t mean some of those scenarios aren’t possible or even likely; it just means we are better off not relying solely on Anxiety to define life’s problems and supply the solutions. Give Joy a chance, or Sadness or even Embarrassment.

Pixar is not going to change the state of the nation (it has its own troubles, after all). But the pained laughter provoked by the movie’s climactic scene — in which Anxiety piles on one disastrous prediction after another — is telling. Between the state of American politics, social media (and legacy media’s attempts to keep up with it) and the trauma inflicted by the pandemic, we have become a nation of anxious adrenaline junkies, ignoring the good, pouncing on the bad and making sweeping generalizations about very complicated things the moment something appears to be going wrong.

Or even before it does. Like Anxiety, we are all increasingly in the business of prediction. Whether on Instagram or CNN, analysts (professional and self-appointed) behave like modern-day soothsayers, peering at the tea leaves of polls, social media, video clips and the general zeitgeist to utter words of prophecy and, increasingly, doom.

Obviously, crises do exist and doom is something to be avoided. The film industry faces a host of challenges, as do many industries, just as they always have. Just as they always will. Alarm bells are important, but they become increasingly less effective if they are rung every hour on the hour.

Not every moment requires an instant call — even refs often go to replays on video. Some moments require calm assessment of the problem and of potential solutions. It’s easy to run around screaming that the sky is falling, more difficult to ascertain if what actually fell is an asteroid or an acorn and if something can be, or needs to be, done about it.

Many things change, for good and ill, but a few do not. The entertainment industry needs to find a firmer financial footing, certainly, but people will always want to be told stories in the dark.

Even if it’s quite difficult to find parking.

The unease lurking in a quiet Pacific Northwest town plagued by a series of murders is a distant second to the fears churning inside the protagonist’s head in Longlegs. Writer-director Osgood Perkins’ serial killer chiller fully acknowledges a debt to The Silence of the Lambs in its chronicle of a young female rookie agent pulled into the FBI manhunt for a killer wiping out entire families. But the movie is also its own freaky trip, a darkly disturbing experience pulsing with an evil that’s unrelenting in its subcutaneous creepiness.

Technically, I guess this could be considered a spoiler, so if you continue reading, don’t complain. But the film allows Nicolas Cage to add another Hall of Fame entry to his gallery of psychos, one that won’t soon be forgotten. If you cast Cage in genre material like this and then only hint at his presence in the trailers, it’s a given that he’s not going to be playing warm and cuddly. The fun in Longlegs is in discovering that Cage’s title character is just one part of the horrific reality behind a growing string of violent deaths.

The full extent of that horror is revealed to be alarmingly close to home for Maika Monroe‘s Agent Lee Harker, who first encountered Longlegs when she was a child, 25 years earlier.

In that attention-grabbing prologue — unfolding a day before the ninth birthday of the young Lee (Lauren Acala) and shown in snug 4:3 aspect ratio with the rounded corners of an old home movie — Perkins adopts the Jaws principle of giving the audience only an unsettling partial glimpse of the monster without being able to form a full picture. What does stay with us is the voice — a fluttery quasi-falsetto of indeterminate gender — as the stranger approaches Lee in the snowy grounds outside her isolated home.

The main action, set around 2000, opens with the adult Lee and her partner Agent Fisk (Dakota Daulby) on their first day out in the field. As they case a suburban cul-de-sac looking for a house they believe is connected to the murders, Lee focuses on an attic window. She informs Fisk, with a tone of absolute certainty, that she has identified the house and that the killer is inside. Her partner brushes off her suggestion of calling for backup, approaching the door full of misplaced confidence.

A Bureau psych evaluation finds Harker to have heightened intuitive abilities, prompting her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), to make her a key member of the investigative team on the murders. Ten houses and ten different families have been hit, with husbands killing wives and children before taking their own lives, using weapons that were already in the house. There are no signs of forced entry or outsider DNA but at the scene of each crime, a note is left behind, written in code and signed “Longlegs.”

As Lee pores over case files and graphic crime-scene photographs, she makes the connection that all the families had daughters whose birthdays fell on the 14th of any given month. She keeps some of her findings to herself, not mentioning to Carter the figure she sees watching her from the woods outside her house, or the cryptic note she later finds on her desk, which helps her crack the code.

Even before Lee’s mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), urges her daughter to keep saying her prayers to protect her from evil, Perkins has begun insinuating hints of religious horror into the film’s hallucinatory mood. When the killings are traced back to a farm family in 1966, whose sole survivor (Kiernan Shipka in a chilling extended cameo) is in a psychiatric institution, it emerges that the elusive Longlegs is a devil worshipper and a dollmaker.

You don’t need to have seen the Annabelle or Chucky movies or the deliciously campy M3GAN (what’s happening with that sequel?) to know that dolls in a horror movie are seldom benign playthings. Accepting one as a gift is foolishness. But even with many of the key elements in place, the movie keeps you guessing for a good long while about how the murders are being orchestrated and who else is involved.

There’s also the fear that Harker, whose heavily medicated mother suggests a family history of mental instability, might be susceptible to the subliminal influences that appear to be part of the killer’s method.

This is gripping stuff that steadily cranks up its nightmarish feeling of dread. Even if the identity of the family that will lead to a conclusive break in the case is telegraphed way too early, the movie continues to work its way under your skin for the duration.

Perkins’ stroke of genius is waiting more than 40 minutes before giving us full visual access to Cage’s Longlegs, whose look is signaled by the lyrics from the pervy T. Rex banger “Get It On” that appear as text on the screen at the start: “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.”

Virtually unrecognizable under heavy facial prosthetics, Cage is like a cross between Marc Bolan and Tiny Tim, a gone-to-seed glam rock casualty with a mop of straggly silver hair, pasty skin and smeared traces of eye makeup and lipstick. That aspect finds sly echoes in album-cover shots of T. Rex’s The Slider and Lou Reed’s Transformer. The weird sing-song voice Cage adopts, often on the brink of hysteria, is unnerving enough, but his physical presence is something else entirely. His mentions of “My friend downstairs” will send shivers down your spine.

Perkins takes his cue from the interviews between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, and the face-to-face confrontation of Lee with Longlegs doesn’t disappoint. It also opens a path for the murder investigation to veer in another direction, one that heightens Lee’s already off-the-charts anxiety levels.

Monroe’s desperate attempts to outrun evil in David Robert Mitchell’s creepy cult hit It Follows seem to have been good training for her character’s ordeal here. Unlike the always direct Carter or fellow agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee), who considers Harker too green to be so central to the investigation, Lee is brooding and uncommunicative, her delivery affectless; she seems petrified by all that she uncovers and at the same time somewhat in thrall to a malignant force and in denial about the lingering trauma of that enigmatic childhood encounter.

Underwood brings gravitas but also family-man affability to Carter, allowing him to gain the trust of wary Harker, while Witt takes her mother Ruth from semi-absent and mildly off-kilter to messed-up beyond repair.

As much as the actors, what gives Longlegs its cursed power is the shivery atmosphere of Andrés Arochi Tinajero’s cinematography, often shooting through doorways or windows that frame our view from insidious angles. Eugenio Battaglia’s dense sound design is another big plus, dialing up jump scares derived from music or other sonic cues rather than leaning on the usual visual tricks. At 101 minutes divided into three chapters, the movie is tautly paced, making deft use of the shifting aspect ratios between past and present and of an eerie score.  

Perkins has traveled down sinister roads before, in his 2015 feature debut The Blackcoat’s Daughter, in his more uneven follow-up, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and in his 2020 contribution to the subgenre of gruesomely reimagined fairy tales, Gretel & Hansel. It might be argued that he stirs too many elements into the mix here — crime procedural, occult mystery, mind manipulation, Satanic worship, scary dolls, a Faustian bargain and a “nun” not fit for any convent. But Longlegs is his most fully realized and relentlessly effective film to date.