Longlegs
Written and directed by Osgood Perkins
Starring Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage and Alicia Witt
Classification N/A; 101 minutes
Opens in theatres July 12
Critic’s Pick
As a marketing phenomenon, the new serial-killer thriller Longlegs is as hyperbolically successful as the questionably sourced review pull-quotes plastered across its trailer: “masterpiece” (Slash Film), “masterpiece” (Screen Anarchy), and … “masterpiece” (Daily Dead). After carefully dribbling out rave reactions for the past month and a half, the film’s advertising experts have carved out a bloody good gash of razor-sharp word-of-mouth. So much so that horror fiends walking into the movie this weekend might expect-slash-hope to be irrevocably traumatized. Hold me, thrill me, kill me!
As a film, though, I have both good and bad news: Longlegs is not going to transcend your nightmares, infest your soul, or cast a plague over your household. Especially not for the hardened genre fans who have mainlined far deeper, more perverse horrors than this toe-dip into dark waters from writer-director Osgood Perkins. Which isn’t a knock on the production itself – this is an imaginatively conceived, impressively scaled, and surprisingly funny ride. Just pay as little attention to the promotional scare tactics as possible.
A tense manhunt flick set in the early nineties – evoking the tech-limbo era of Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, in which detective work had to be conducted not on computers, but door to door – the film focuses on rookie FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) and her quest to solve the case of Longlegs, a serial killer who has evaded authorities for decades.
Fond of leaving notes full of ciphers and satanic imagery – and as Lee soon finds out, constructing terrifyingly realistic life-sized dolls of his child-age victims – Longlegs exists as a fanciful boogeyman who is half Zodiac Killer, half demented Geppetto (with a little bit of Phantasm’s Tall Man thrown in, too). Yet as Lee dives deeper into the case, with the help of her straight-arrow supervisor Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) and the repressed memories of her deeply religious mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), the young fed discovers that she might possess a personal link to the murders.
Split into three chapters, the film works best as an exercise in neo-grindhouse style and atmosphere, with Perkins translating Italy’s crimson-soaked Giallo cinema to the grey and dour visual language of the American heartland. As Harker’s investigation takes her from weather-stripped rural farmhouses to cookie-cutter subdivision housing, Perkins patiently and artfully builds the grimy, left-to-rust-and-rot visual nightmare lurking beneath every American Dream.
The crushing dread of Ruth’s pack-rat home, the sterile tidiness of the Carter family’s living room, the shadowy wood-panelled board rooms of the FBI field office: these are all deeply haunting spaces on their own, with or without the background threat of a fugitive murderer.
Which might be why every time that Perkins’s film does feature its titular madman, its grip on the psyche slips. As played by Nicolas Cage in full-tilt NICOLAS FREAKIN’ CAGE mode, Longlegs is a creation whose fear factor constantly and dangerously wobbles between the surreal and the super-silly. Caked in pasty white makeup and outfitted with wild strands of dusty-grey hair, Cage looks like the non-union equivalent of Beetlejuice after a particularly nasty all-night bender, accented with the high-pitched growl of Heath Ledger’s Joker.
When it comes to his villain, it’s clear that Perkins is going for something so sinister as to transcend American psycho ambiguity – the exact opposite of Alfred Hitchcock’s approach when he directed Perkins’s father, Anthony, to super-creep stardom so many decades ago. But the character, and Cage’s killer-clown performance, is too manic to be truly satanic.
Far better is Monroe (already a horror veteran thanks to It Follows and The Guest), who provides a tremendous amount of grit and zeal to a hero whose motivations lie in a past that doesn’t begin to get excavated until the film’s final stretch. Her limited interactions with Cage don’t generate as much evil electricity as Perkins is aiming for – Clarice and Hannibal they are not – but the actress does get deeper under the script’s skin during her scenes alongside Witt, who is unrecognizable from her late-nineties It Girl days.
There is also a wonderfully unnerving bit performance midway through the film from Kiernan Shipka, who most audiences will know as Don Draper’s daughter on Mad Men, but who also steadied Perkins’s 2015 film The Blackcoats’ Daughter in much the same way Monroe does here. Playing the lone survivor of a Longlegs massacre, Shipka twirls her tongue around dialogue that’s been written in riddles, all while casting the most silently furious of glares at Monroe, playing her naïve inquisitor. It is a short and deliberately sour performance that turns more heads than any of Longlegs’s gory antics.
As for the film’s faux-rabid marketing? We can say the devil made ‘em do it.