2024 | rated R | starring Maika Monroe, Nicholas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt | written & directed by Osgood Perkins | 1h 41m | 4 out of 5 |
As a director, Osgood Perkins has so far leaned toward the more niche, atmospheric horror crowd with his first films, The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel and Hansel. With Longlegs, the writer/director makes a satisfying step toward a more crowd-pleasing serial killer thriller, albe it with a heavy dose of just-beyond-reach supernaturalism. It’s a movie awash in atmosphere, a machine of sonic horror movie tricks to keep the nerves rattling and a vehicle for it’s two leads to dig their teeth into meaty material.
Young FBI agent Lee (Maika Monroe, a modern final girl of slow-burn elevated horror) with a suspected psychic gift is tapped to solve the decades old unsolved Longlegs murders, a series of brutal murders in which family members murdered their entire family, unconnected, but for a perpetrator sharing the same birthday and note signed by “Longlegs” at the crime scene. As Lee and her supervisor (Blair Underwood) get closer to the truth they find it has satanic origins.
Longlegs isn’t the greatest serial killer movie, “the best since Seven” or “… Silence of the Lambs“, but it is good and in this climate where we are starved for pure genre entertainment, good can get overhyped. The movie for its flaws – and this story gets very convoluted – is right in my wheelhouse. An atmospheric serial killer hunt set in a quiet, snowy middle-american town set in the 90s. Much of it plays out like a tight procedural with the supernatural elements skirting just along of the edges – but definitely present. In the reality of Longlegs satanic powers do exist in which some people can be vaguely psychic and other people (and things) can control minds. In addition to being visually beautifully crafted, Perkins knows every audio trick in the horror book to screech and scrap through the soundtrack to create a constant atmosphere of dread. Clanging fans and jump scare screams. The movie is shot the same way, with the frame leaving room for us to focus on an open door in the background and wonder if something is going to come through it. Or in one of my favorite scenes, a TV paused on Nicholas Cage mid-maniacal expression sitting in the background as if he’s about to leap out of the screen.
The first half of Longlegs is better than the last half and it relates almost directly to how much screen time Nicholas Cage gets. The film is simply creepier when our killer is left off screen or left to the imagination. Once we finally get a full view of his long hippie hair and ashy white face that creep factor gets lost. And it gets worse, the more Perkins allows or insists Cage chew the scenery with his usual brand of insane outbursts. It’s hard to blame Cage for this, because the actor is arguably excellent in the first half when he is kept restrained. Perkins miscalculates the impact of revealing Longlegs so early in the film and allowing him to turn into a typical Cage maniac. He is also the first of a handful of unsatisfying twists.
Ultimately, the film’s final explanation makes puts all the puzzles in place and is weird enough to make it all stand out from the serial killer crowd. It also feels unnecessarily convoluted: we get Satan, birthdays, pentagrams, accomplices, family ties and dolls. The movie rides that line between over and under explaining what is happening and I would argue falls a bit too much in the over-explaining, wrapping the solution up so tightly that it starts to fold in on itself. That said, for this story, it still works in its own way. I was entertained all the way through even if I shook my head at a few parts.
It’s possible Longlegs becomes simply a calling card for Oz Perkins to make more mainstream thrillers, which is fine by me. This movie is very well made, Perkins knows horror down to its bones, the visual language of it, how to shoot and frame and edit it. How to manipulate and misdirect the audience. This movie could be taught in filmmaking classes and I’m eagerly anticipating what the director tries to tackle next. The movie just probably won’t be taught in any scriptwriting classes.