With little of the fanfare or cult of personality that has greeted the Peeles, Eggers, and Asters of the world, filmmaker Oz Perkins (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) has quietly amassed a small but notable following as a rather cerebral and form-focused horror filmmaker. It’s a cult following that’s likely to get more crowded and less anonymous with the release of his new film, Longlegs, which arrives following months of attention-grabbing viral marketing and “this is the one you’ve been waiting for” buzz from horror influencers (as of this writing, the film just had the biggest opening weekend ever for specialty distributor NEON). The secret handshake nature of Perkins — his most recent film, Gretel & Hansel was dumped into theaters with little fanfare a month before the pandemic — works in Longlegs’ favor; it’s an uncommonly confident film, far more interested in establishing a pervasive air of dread and approaching evil from a standpoint of almost spiritual rot than it is in shock effects or gore (although it’s no slouch in that department either) that has none of the accompanying baggage of being a widely recognized brand. It’s a bag of tricks refined outside the spotlight, with the director prioritizing shot composition, stillness, navigating tricky tonal shifts, and that hard-to quantify-sensation that something you can’t quite place is “off.” It’s a “don’t go in that room” film where you’re often surprised to find the hair on your arms standing upright, even when “nothing” is happening.
And yet, for all of its obvious strengths, there’s something slightly deflating about the film: the way fantastical elements are haphazardly introduced (and subsequently abandoned), as though simply acknowledging the supernatural becomes a catch-all that excuses the unexplainable; the somnolent pacing and earth tones color scheme, which is perhaps too effective in lulling the viewer into a false sense of complacency; the way the film carries itself like a crime procedural while drawing upon the metaphysical to solve itself. Once you’ve established that your protagonist is both selectively clairvoyant and someone whose personal history is paramount in cracking the film’s symbology, any chance of the viewer getting ahead of the mystery is left in the dust. And then, of course, there are Longlegs‘ two diametrically opposed lead performances: one going for reserved and internalized, but coming across as nearly recessive; the other baroque to the point of drawing undue attention to itself. It’s the kind of film that when we finally take in Nicolas Cage’s titular serial killer in toto, it starts to generate counterproductive thoughts like, “why did it take several decades for the authorities to get hip to this creep?” The whole here may be greater than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts really do the film no favors.
After a brief prologue set in the ’70s that depicts a confused young girl’s fraught introduction to a pale, stringy-haired and reedy-voiced man of dubious intent (Cage, in the sort of without-a-net performance that defined the actor for the first half of his career), we jump ahead 20 years to junior FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) on a doomed canvasing effort to track down an armed suspect. After intuiting with absolute certainty and no evidence to support it which house on a suburban street is harboring the suspect, Lee ends up with a murdered partner, a high-profile collar, and an official designation within the Bureau as a quasi-psychic (as part of the battery of tests she undergoes, she’s asked to guess a number from “zero to one hundred” which she sheepishly admits she only nailed eight out of sixteen times). Hoping she might possess some special insight into the case, Harker’s superior, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), assigns her to the Longlegs case, representing a series of unsolved ritual homicides stretching back decades. The pattern is as confounding as it is stomach-churning: in nearly a dozen instances, a father murders every member of his household before killing himself, with the only thing connecting them being a handwritten letter found at the scene with an indecipherable, vaguely Satanic code with the signature “Longlegs.” As Harker is drawn further into the case, she begins to identify patterns in the murders that would reveal a methodology in how the killer selects his victims, but not how he’s able to apparently activate homicidal impulses in ordinary people. Does the killer have an accomplice as Harker believes, or is he, as Longlegs himself claims, doing the work of Satan and as such has been imbued with powers beyond our comprehension? And what role, if any, does Harker’s past have in untangling the web? (No points for guessing who the little girl in the pre-title sequence is.)
Set in the early ’90s — we’re greeted by portraits of William Jefferson Clinton whenever we spend any time in the FBI field office — and featuring a protagonist who’s a diminutive female FBI agent with mousy features, Longlegs draws considerable inspiration from The Silence of the Lambs, particularly its affinity for puzzles, clues tucked away for years waiting to be unearthed, and its muted color palette. And if Longlegs falls short of that film’s indelible alchemy of pop storytelling, psychoanalysis for beginners, and Grand Guignol theatricality, it similarly recognizes the transgressive power in shattering the quotidian with unspeakable acts of violence, especially when the objective appears to be to erode our faith in humanity itself. The film’s intentions are blunt, but there’s an undeniably primal charge in confronting evil not as a distillation of (metaphorical) demons, but as an end unto itself; there is no explicating Longlegs’ motives — we either accept he’s an agent of Satan himself or has achieved such a level of self-radicalization that the distinction is irrelevant. It all runs the risk of becoming ludicrous, yet Perkins grounds the film’s events within the realm of the drably commonplace, setting scenes in dreary, underlit locations with none of the torture chamber chic or clean lines of David Fincher’s serial killer films. Perkins’ primarily photographs the film in an ultra-wide aspect ratio — the exception being the flashback sequences, which are shot in Academy — and favors long takes that emphasize extreme depth of field and the play between offscreen and onscreen (one of the film’s more unnerving sequences involves an unsuspecting character framed in the extreme foreground while seated in the front seat of a vehicle, unaware that somebody is slowly coming up behind the car with a shotgun as seen through the driver’s side rear window). It creates the effect of the characters constantly feeling observed even in moments of supposed isolation. During the screening this writer attended, one audience member called out in a stage whisper “someone’s coming through that door!” during a scene where a character sat with their backs to an open doorway, and while no one actually does, their jumpiness can be forgiven. The film excels at thrashing your nerves to the point that the viewer is forced to be every bit as skittish as the characters.
But having experienced the film and reflected on its intentions, one’s left to consider whether there’s anything to takeaway from it other than it being an accomplished technical exercise. Nihilism is endemic to horror, but it tends to leave more of a lasting mark when we actually care about the characters. For all of Monroe’s efforts to convey her character crawling out of her shell or pushing back against being a pawn in someone else’s game, Harker remains a blank (even her psychic abilities are largely ornamental). Cage’s performance, meanwhile, comes across like gonzo kabuki; announcing its “otherness” even in scenes where Longlegs is theoretically attempting to move through the world “anonymously” — to Perkins’ credit, the film treats the character like a pungent garnish, sprinkled throughout in small doses and often framed so that the actor’s prosthetic-covered face is obscured from the viewer. It’s hard to begrudge a performer making such a concerted choice, but the extent to which that choice hinders vs. enriches could be the “your mileage may vary” of the year. And then there’s the exact nature of Longlegs’ “influence” over others, which requires a canyon-sized leap of faith and would seem to raise more questions than it answers. To a certain extent, unknowability is intrinsic to the film, and Perkins is within his rights to sow ambiguity as his modus operandi. But it also simply feels like a cheat. Whenever the film needs to explain that which defies all logic, say, for example, who’s on the other end of a hugely consequential phone call that arrives late (after we’ve run out of characters who would have the inclination to place it), Longlegs can shrug its shoulders and infer: “the devil, probably.”
DIRECTOR: Oz Perkins; CAST: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: July 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
