by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
Presence | 2025
A ghostly presence haunts a family's new home in Steven Soderbergh's Presence - but this is in no way a typical haunted house movie. Soderbergh puts the audience directly in the spirit's point of view, drifting in and out of rooms and observing the new family's unfolding conflicts.
Longlegs | 2024
If movies were defined solely by their marketing campaigns, then Osgood Perkins' Longlegs would easily be one of the best of the year. Movies are quite a bit more than their marketing campaigns, however, and my feelings on Longlegs are much more muted.
A trans woman gets out of bed and pads across the room to the bathroom. She is naked. She goes to the bathroom. She brushes her teeth. It is a ritual I've performed so many times without a second thought, and now I'm watching it in a movie. I am struck by how commonplace this feels, how incredibly normal. I notice that her body isn't that different from mine. This is not a hyper-sexualized porn star; this is a regular transgender woman living a regular life. Our bodies are so often fetishized that it feels wholly transgressive to see a nude trans woman on screen simply existing - not being used as a sex object or an object of pity, just another woman going through motions that feel so mundane yet so familiar.