The fact that I liked Longlegs despite going in so biased against it speaks to how well writer-director Osgood Perkins executes his bleak, dread-filled vision. Perkins’ previous works Gretel and Hansel and The Blackcoat’s Daughter did have a great atmosphere, but failed to engage me on the level of story and character. On the other hand, Longlegs has the advantage of following the classic serial killer movie template, giving it a strong narrative backbone upon which to hang that great atmosphere. Perkins recently said that he has no interest in modern horror movies, but he sure has an interest in nineties horror movies, because he put The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, and Cure into a blender and poured out this devilish smoothie of a horror film.
After an Academy-ratio cold open giving us our first brief glimpse of the titular Longlegs, the frame widens to take us into 1990s Oregon, where we meet FBI Agent Clarice Starl—I mean Lee Harker, who might be psychic or something? I don’t know, it’s a kind of unnecessary genre flourish that’s mostly good for flashes of snakes and whatnot, but sure! The movie is full of little details like this that you will want to question heavily afterward, but in the moment, it all washes over you because of the off-kilter world Perkins sucks you into.
Neon’s very successful marketing campaign kept Longlegs and the nature of his murders as mysterious as possible, but they could have used them as a hook because…this is a serial killer movie where the serial killer does not appear to have killed anyone at all. Not directly, at least. He’s merely taken credit for a series of murder-suicides involving families, leaving coded messages that no one has been able to crack in decades. Naturally, within about five minutes of Harker’s being on the case, she’s identified key connections between the victims and decoded those messages.
As I said, the film follows the serial killer movie template, so Harker follows clues and finds evidence. She talks to the only known survivor of one of Longlegs’s murders (Kiernan Shipka, who previously worked with Perkins in The Blackcoat’s Daughter, kills it, making archaic, folksy language threatening rather than silly). She digs deeper into her past and her relationship with her mother because she needs to silence those lambs, you know. I was here for this investigation even if many elements of the investigation required some leaps of logic. But sure!
The reason I could “But sure!” so much of this movie is because I spent most of it unconsciously clutching my hand or clutching my arm, just infused with tension. It reminded me of the effect Skinamarink had on me, where I was almost petrified. Perkins knocks you off guard in the early scenes, so you’re constantly afraid of what might come next at any moment. He spikes your heart rate occasionally with arthouse jump scares, which are what I’ve decided to call using brutal editing and musical stings to throw distress at the audience rather than have anything physically happening onscreen to induce a scare.
But on the other end of the spectrum, he also uses a lot of slow push-ins on scenes that might otherwise be a static shot, conveying the sense that the world is closing in on Harker or perhaps that Longlegs is slowly approaching. On two occasions, Perkins pulls off wonderful reveals of an out-of-focus character in the background, the second of which garnered fantastic audience reactions in my packed Monday night theater. So many moments in the movie had me on edge with the no-no-no’s, that helplessness you get when the characters don’t realize that horror is about to befall them.
This grey-tinged world almost devoid of color feels low-key apocalyptic. It’s not as drenched in it as Se7en or quite as unholy about it as Cure, but the occult angle allows for the possibility that Longlegs‘s goals come with dire consequences.
And what of the mysterious Longlegs himself, played by the singular Nicolas Cage? Hoo boy, he’s buried under prosthetics and pale-faced make-up, but he’s remarkably restrained in his own way most of the time. I was impressed with the coldness in his voice, that tinge of menace within the unhinged delivery. The film makes a point not to show too much of him for a while, which heightens his mystery, mythologizing him within the movie. I really liked Cage when he was simply speaking, but there are times when he breaks into song, and I think it’s supposed to be unnerving but I found it more goofy, Cage uncaged. Luckily plenty else about the movie is unnerving!
As for the rest of the cast, Maika Monroe continues to cement her Scream Queen status despite not actually screaming in this movie since she gives an intentionally disaffected performance, keeping Harker’s emotions—if she has any—close to her chest. I enjoyed Blair Underwood as her superior and Michelle Choi-Lee as his partner, both of them adding a little humor to the movie. Humor? In an Oz Perkins movie?! Hey, that helps me connect to the characters as actual people! You’re learning, Perkins. But the real standout in the supporting department is Alicia Witt as Harker’s very religious mother. Witt commands the screen whenever she’s on it, the entire history of her character written all over her face.
I came to this film with much trepidation, having heard that like the other Perkins films I’d seen, it was more about Vibes than story, but these were my kind of Vibes and the story was compelling and relatively well told. Most mainstream serial killer movies are pretty tame, but this is one of those “the world is fucked and evil walks among us” movies that I dig. The visuals and score by Zilgi—aka Elvis Perkins (yes relation, that’s his brother)—gripped me for all 101 minutes, from that deeply unsettling opening scene to that deeply unsettling final scene. Much is indeed left unexplained by the end, including the supernatural element, which is what I’m always most interested in. And yet for Longlegs, the excess of ambiguity only made it that much more unsettling.
When I came home, it was quiet and empty. Or was it? Was there someone there? In my home? Every sound I made was suddenly magnified. I don’t know if Longlegs is a good movie. But I do know that if it left me feeling vaguely unsafe afterward, it’s a good horror movie.
