Backed by a smartly calculated marketing campaign that has teased, but not shown, the face of Nicolas Cage’s serial killer, Oz Perkins’ thriller Longlegs arrived with a lot of hype. Most of that buzz was for an expectedly unhinged performance by Cage, an actor who has embraced self-caricature and used it to deliver career highlights. And Cage, utterly unrecognizable in a fashion that is both ridiculous and terrifying, is the one thing to look forward to as Perkins (son of Psycho actor Anthony Perkins) struggles to find a balance between Silence of the Lambs procedural horror and the exaggerated Satanism B-movies of the 1970s.
Longlegs is at its best the more it keeps the audience at a distance, hiding its true intentions in shadow and cultish symbolism. The story, also penned by Perkins, centers on FBI agent Lee Harker, played by It Follows actress Maika Monroe, who is investigating a series of family annihilating murders spread over decades by someone named “Longlegs”. The killer always escapes without a trace, sometimes having killed weeks or even months prior without anyone the wiser. Left in the bloodshed’s wake are weird coded messages, that only Harker, who has a special intuitiveness and a link to Longlegs she might not be ready to face, can crack.
Perkins is a talented visual filmmaker, especially in finding ways to conjure up an atmosphere of dread. His fairy tale twist Gretel & Hansel craftily blends fantasy and horror imagery that elevates a minimalist story. Longlegs sends a chill down our spine early on as we witness the killers’ first assault under the cover of fallen snow. The film periodically stabs you in the gut with its suggestive brutality, allowing one’s imagination to take hold. Actual gore is fairly absent, although the sight of rotting corpses is disturbing enough. Story details are derivative, though; you’ve seen it all before in variations of Se7en, Zodiac, and a thousand others. Monroe’s Harker, who appears to also be on the spectrum, is a blank slate of a character and not at all interesting or complicated as Clarice Starling, clearly an inspiration. It’s a shame because Monroe, who has been amazing since her breakout in At Any Price, can do so much more than she’s given to work with, but I felt this was the first time she looked like she was acting with a capital “A”.
There’s also been a severe miscalculation when it comes to Cage. Yes, his performance is loud and nutty, but buried under tons of make-up and wild costumes that it’s unclear if we’re supposed to fear Longlegs or laugh at him. To be fair, Cage is just working with what’s been given to him, dialing up the craziness to fit the film’s sudden manic shift where everything is on the table including the supernatural. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and Longlegs never gets under our skin the way that we were led to believe that it would.
Longlegs is open in theaters now.
