Writer/director Osgood Perkins has gotten quite the reputation as a horror filmmaker when it’s never truly seemed to be his goal to scare people. His objective with film like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House seems more to be to get under people’s skin and make them uncomfortable or anxious and less outright terrified. His latest work, Longlegs, is being touted as flat-out horror tale about the unique relationship FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) has had with a serial killer who calls himself Longlegs (Nicolas Cage in pale makeup and a weird voice) over many decades—from the 1970s, when she was a little girl (Lauren Acala) living with her single mother (Alicia Witt), until the “present day” of the 1990s (which is firmly established by the abundance of Bill Clinton photos on every wall in government buildings).
As is observed by everyone she works with, including her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), Harker has what appears to be a psychic connection to Longlegs (and other suspects) and is able to solve many a case. She’s able to decode messages he leaves at crime scenes and figures out that all of his young female victims were all born on the 14th of the month, and that the date he actually abducts them is tied to that. For about the first two-thirds of Longlegs, the film feels like a strangely specific tribute to Silence of the Lambs, minus the Hannibal Lecter flair. Harker was an early Longlegs captive who managed not to die, although the reason for this is saved for a big reveal that isn’t that surprising. There is no end to filmmaker Perkins’s use of familiar serial-killer tropes, and by the time he gets to far more interesting twists in the storytelling, I’d already lost interest in where Harker’s journey was taking us.
For those saying that Cage’s work here is just another one of his wacky performances, I’d disagree with that take. He’s not simply going for odd here; his gnarled and exaggerated body language suggests something quite damaged and disturbing. There’s also a vague supernatural element to Longlegs that not only doesn’t work, it doesn’t make sense in the context of a film that seems obsessed with a type of dry, grey hyper-realism.
There are a few moments of sudden, extreme violence that seem designed to make sure you don’t ever get comfortable with the more docile, procedural tones of most of the film; there’s also an out-of-left-field sequence involving another one of Longlegs’ living victims (an almost unrecognizable Kiernan Shipka) that is unsettling in the moment, but never really pays off. In fact, the closer Longlegs comes to wrapping things up, the more desperate the payoff and the more unsatisfying it grows. This is a good-looking work, without doubt, and the performances from Monroe and Underwood are particularly strong. But nothing about this movie is especially scary or creepily atmospheric, and that feels like a key missing element of the whole affair, and it lessens what is great about it.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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