Longlegs needed one more scene

polygon.com:

In a conversation with Polygon before the release of the horror-thriller movie Longlegs, writer-director Oz Perkins discussed how he came up with the movie’s ending: “I suppose if I could tell people anything, it’s like, ‘You just got to keep showing up and doing it and poking at it, and turning it around and poking at it some more, and seeing if you can…’ You know, like a crossword puzzle. ‘I’m pretty sure 9 across is that.’ Then you start to fill in 8 down. You just build it and massage it and stay with it, stay present with it.”

While that’s meant to describe how he wrote the movie, it also applies to us on the other end of his process, watching the film and trying to figure out how to feel about it. Longlegs ends in a place that’s guaranteed to launch arguments, but it’s missing the kind of fuel that make ambiguous endings exciting to discuss. It feels like it needed one more scene, not to resolve its story, but to give us all more productive ways to engage with it. Let’s talk about what that ending does and doesn’t offer, and whether Perkins’ “keep poking at it” process paid off.

[Ed. note: End spoilers ahead for Longlegs.]

In the movie, 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 perpetrated by fathers who massacre their families, then kill themselves. Lee eventually learns that the mysterious figure Longlegs (Nicolas Cage, unrecognizable under heavy prosthetics), who left coded messages at the scenes of the crimes, has been making dolls infused with some sort of Satanic essence that takes control of entire families, prompting the murders.

When Lee compares her psychic flashes to her own childhood memories, she realizes who the killer is, and sends the FBI to pick him up. But he kills himself in custody by repeatedly bashing his head against a hard surface — the exact same way the possessed killer does in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, one of