Film Review: Longlegs
LONGLEGS IS NOT WHAT YOU EXPECT
The hype of Oz Perkins’ Longlegs being “so scary your heart will explode” is certainly misplaced. What starts as a shaky, ineffectual Kurosawa pastiche evolves into a uniquely American take on ambient terror; believe it or not, Longlegs isn’t about jump scares or even Nicolas Cage’s wacked-out Satanist, it’s about the malaise of the human condition tucked away in the cracks of modern apathy. Minor spoilers ahead…
An FBI agent rings a doorbell and is immediately gunned down in broad daylight, rotting corpses of annihilated families lie undiscovered in their homes for months, the outside world has fallen away. This is Oz Perkins’ Longlegs. For over a year, the film’s cryptically withholding - and successful - marketing campaign sold its rancid vibes, and recently, its festival reactions touted just how scary the movie supposedly is: a blitz of hype so effective that distributor Neon’s own promotion underwent a last-minute shift from sinister mystique to “so scary your heart will explode.” The most terrifying aspects of Longlegs, however, aren’t in its spooky ciphers, sharp jolts, or even Nicolas Cage’s full freak-flag performance, it’s in the stink of apathy - the rot and indifference of an empty world tucked away in the movie’s oppressive Pacific Northwest gothic. With its uniquely American approach to a Kurosawa pastiche (Kyoshi, not Akira), Longlegs’ most important interrogations don’t really ask how or why these things are happening, but rather, does anyone even care?
Centered around “lady FBI agent” Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, once again demonstrating her superb interiority in a horror movie), Longlegs fills in its morose world with a decades-long manhunt for its titular serial killer (Nicolas Cage): a reclusive Satanist with an indecipherable method and schedule of murder. Harker, whose own near-superhuman levels of intuition abets the bureau’s investigation into Longlegs and the baffling ciphers left at the crime scenes, gradually begins to piece together her case as well as the insidious thread between herself, her religiously doting mother (an unsettling Alicia Witt), and the killer at large. An amalgam of different fictional mindhunters that settles into her own, stoic groove, Monroe’s Harker ends up being much more than just a Clarice Starling to Longleg’s Hannibal Lecter. The FBI tests her latent psychic powers with mixed results, but her supportive superior, Agent Carter, is an optimist: “Half psychic is better than no psychic.”
“The most terrifying aspects of Longlegs, however, aren’t in its spooky ciphers, sharp jolts, or even Nicolas Cage’s full freak-flag performance, it’s in the stink of apathy…”
In interviews, Oz Perkins contrasts Longlegs with its obvious influences of timeless serial killer yarn such as Seven, Zodiac, and Silence of the Lambs, but also conveys his desire to do something different. Tapping into more unexpected inspiration like A Woman Under the Influence and Renaldo & Clara, Perkins attempts to create cinema that is “living.” And Longlegs does indeed “live,” but most assuredly not in the way of Cassevetes nor Dylan. It squirms. And pulsates. There’s talk that the film doesn’t quite meet its “terrifying” reputation; however, the potency of Longlegs doesn’t lie in its traditional scares nor its flimsy mystery - which features moments that range from downright creepy to undercooked window dressing - but in its atmospheric malaise. Even a committed Nicolas Cage, who is once again sufficiently over-the-top, can’t compete with the gnawing sensation that something is seriously wrong with this barren hellscape. A dark mirror where any evidence of the outside world is stripped down to newspaper clippings, the universe of Longlegs has its horrors not in its boogeymen, but in the sinister indifference sulking in every corner of DP Andrés Arochi’s shadowed photography. In a world where children’s birthday parties have no children, Perkins dares to populate Longlegs with only killers, victims, and those fated to chase both.
Those expecting Longlegs to live up to its marketing might be sorely disappointed, but peek behind the rancid curtains of its pastiche and you’ll find a diet Kurosawa that is arresting in its own way. There’s a melange of horror - filial tensions, occult machinations, ritual murder - that struggles for coherence, but Oz Perkins is absolutely consistent with his construction of blanketing, relentless dread. Summoned from the deepest pits of a uniquely American brand of detachment, Longlegs is much more than the sum of its parts.
