Is Longlegs the new daddy of horror?
Writer/ Director Osgood Perkins assembles his latest chiller with the same fastidious sense of meticulous precision as its title character. Longlegs is a carefully created experience, an intoxicating blend of ambience, heightened reality and surreal police procedural thriller.
In 1990s Oregon, preternaturally intuitive FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is brought on to a task force hunting a serial killer known as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), who has been ritualistically killing families since the 1970s. As the case unfolds, Harker finds herself drawn into a sinister web of satanic worship, mind control and a terrifying secret from her past.
Perkins, ever the meticulous craftsman, constructs Longlegs with a painterly eye. The film’s visuals take their cue from its 1970s-set home movie-style prologue and although the action rolls forwards a couple of decades, it never fully shakes off the brown-hued Formica aesthetic. There are echoes of the claustrophobic dread of Kubrick’s The Shining, and the sound design punctuates the air with a disquiet that lingers long after the final note. Yet, this meticulousness often feels like a double-edged sword. While the ambiance is undoubtedly immersive, it sometimes veers into the realm of distraction, the styling threatening to overwhelm the substance, coming perilously close to offering us a glimpse of Wes Anderson’s Hannibal.
Monroe’s portrayal of Agent Harker, a figure of taut intensity and simmering unease, is central to the film’s atmospherics, perhaps more so that the outré figure of Longlegs himself, played by Nicholas Cage looking like he never gave John Travolta’s face back after Face/Off. She imbues the movie with a palpable sense of terror, yet the character remains frustratingly opaque. Her interactions, particularly the stilted calls to her religious mother, fail to anchor her in a relatable reality. Instead, Harker drifts through the film like a spectre, her backstory hinted at but never fully articulated. She haunts the film, a heavy breathing presence that we can’t escape. Cage, by contrast, is a force of nature, his performance a chaotic dance that teeters on the edge of parody. He injects the film with a frenzied and kinetic energy, but his presence occasionally disrupts the carefully constructed tension, his eccentricities clashing with the film’s more sombre tone. Never mind the fact he’s made up to look like Gary Busey playing the bloated corpse of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler after three days in a river.
There are obvious echoes of The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, yet Longlegs never quite achieves the same balance of character depth and atmospheric dread. Where Demme and Fincher masterfully intertwine their protagonists’ humanity with the inhumanity they face, Perkins’ film can often feel like an elaborate diorama, beautifully crafted but emotionally two-dimensional.
That being said, Longlegs’ ability to create a sense of disorientation and entrapment is remarkable. Perkins holds the audience in a vice-like grip, his claustrophobic settings and eerie visuals binding the audience in a trance but that trance is too beguiling for its own good and when the reveals and twists start tumbling out at the end of the movie in a rush of revelations that create a narrative pile-up you’d prefer to have a clear head to analyse.
In the end, Longlegs is a film that mesmerizes and yet ultimately frustrates by not quite sticking the landing. It’s a film that invites you into its carefully crafted nightmare, only to leave you yearning for the emotional depth and narrative coherence that it so tantalizingly nearly delivers.
