07/19/2024
Longlegs
Osgood Perkins, dir.
2024
Turn on Shudder or Screambox and you’ll find many, many genres of horror: Folk Horror, Slashers, Haunted Houses, Possession, Obsessive Love…the list goes on. I would argue though that, at bottom, there are two basic schools of horror: horror that endangers your body, and horror that endangers your soul. Osgood Perkins’ heavily hyped new movie treads a queasy line between the two, following the trail of a vicious serial killer who opens up bodies like birthday gifts to get at what’s inside.
If you’ve been online at all over the past few months, you’ve seen the marketing for this movie, which suggests that it’s something like “Silence of the Lambs” – but with demons! The marketing campaign has been brilliant, but it flattens out the sheer weirdness of this movie. The premise of “Longlegs” echoes Jonathan Demme’s classic: a young, female FBI agent is drawn into the search for a brutal, elusive serial killer. The similarities end there. Vulnerable, deeply damaged Lee Harker is no Clarice Starling and Longlegs (the moniker the serial killer has chosen for himself) is neither Dr. Lector nor Buffalo Bill. There are also slivers and shards of other horror movies in here, from “Rosemary’s Baby” to “Annabelle,” but “Longlegs” is its own unsettling monster.
Mild spoilers ahead.
This movie is likely to divide audiences, in part because any marketing campaign so smart and successful is bound to raise expectations to an impossible height. But “Longlegs” is likely to be divisive because of its distinctive, pervasive style. Don’t walk into this movie expecting big twists (although there are a couple of startling revelations) or big jump scares (although again, there are a couple of moments that may propel you out of your seat). Don’t expect a tightly plotted procedural. Plot is almost beside the point. (There’s an underlying suggestion that human action and human intention are meaningless.) Instead, this is a sustained exercise in dread: the movie opens on a washed-out winter day in the Pacific Northwest as a little girl scribbles in a coloring book and a paneled station wagon lurks just at the edge of the property. You get the inescapable feeling that something bad is about to happen; something bad may have already happened…and things are only going to get worse. There is little action in this scene, but it sets a tone of palpable anxiety (and ends with a shock that may have you throwing your popcorn).
After this opening, we meet Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a serious young FBI agent with an uncanny sense of trouble. This sixth sense earns the attention of one of her superiors, Carter (Blair Underwood), who has been tasked with trying to solve the case of a serial killer who has been haunting the Pacific Northwest for decades. The killer’s MO is unconventional: through a series of coded messages, he has implicated himself in a series of grisly murders. In each one, an apparently loving father has slaughtered his family and then himself in what looks like an open-and-shut murder-suicide, but the coded messages and the similarity of the scenes has led the FBI to believe that a serial killer is murdering the families or is influencing the murders. Harker joins the hunt only to realize that she too is being hunted.
Even aside from this weirdness, all is not well in this world. Harker is socially awkward and withdrawn, comfortable only when she is working on a case. She has stilted phone conversations with her anxious, absent mother (Alicia WItt), who urges her to say her prayers. Carter is genial and charming, but he avoids his own family and drinks a little too much. And it’s not just the characters, it’s the setting. “Longlegs” takes place in a world apparently devoid of cities – and of groups of people. Buildings are isolated farmhouses, darkened cabins, or empty suburban constructions. The world is full of shadows – often the camera places Harker at the center or side of a frame with darkness around her. The palette veers from wintry grays and whites to murky browns and greens; the world is muted or muddled, making the sudden splashes of crimson all the more shocking. The sound design is similarly muted. Long stretches of silence are broken with the sound of a door handle or the chorus of a rock song, to startling effect.
“But,” I hear you asking, “what about Nicolas Cage?” Because if there’s one thing people know about this movie aside from the whole Satanic-serial-killer schtick, it’s that the movie features a villainous turn from Nicolas Cage at his Cage-iest. His performance is everything you would expect – weird, showy, unsettling – but it’s also controlled. Cage seems to have drawn inspiration from weirdo novelty rocker TIny Tim, creating a monster who is childlike, androgynous, nutty, and skincrawlingly strange. For most of the movie, the camera refuses to meet Longlegs head on, allowing us to see him only in glimpses, at odd angles, from the corners of our eyes, underscoring his elusiveness. We come to learn a few things about Longlegs – his love of glam rock, his preference for the color white, his devotion to Satan – but he remains an enigma. He seems less possessed by the devil than hollowed out. It’s significant that this movie’s vision of evil isn’t suave or calculating but kind of shabby and pathetic…but that doesn’t make evil less powerful.
If you’re familiar with the work of Osgood Perkins (son of “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins and costar of Reese Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde” – werk!), you know that this movie will be moody, atmospheric, great-looking, slow-moving, and unconventional. Perkins built his reputation and his aesthetic with gorgeous, oblique thrillers like “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” and “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.” Like those films, “Longlegs” has powerful – almost overwhelming – style and a sense of dread that keeps ratcheting up through the movie’s run time. Does it always make sense? Um, no. Is it the scariest movie of the decade? No again. Will it make you so unbearably tense that you stop breathing for long moments? Hell, yeah. Perkins’ vision – a gray, empty rural landscape haunted by incomprehensible forces – may not inspire terror, but it’s steeped in despair and dread.
“Longlegs” is not what its marketing would suggest and it’s not what you may expect, but if you want diabolical vibes that will have you searching the shadows and peering over your shoulder, this could be exactly what you’re looking for.