Longlegs – Film Review
by David Turpin

Director – Oz Perkins
Writer – Oz Perkins
Stars – Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood

It’s a minor miracle that, after months of tantalising trailers, Osgood Perkins’ latest opus arrives on our screens with much of its mystique intact.  Notionally a serial killer mystery with occult trappings, Longlegs is actually best enjoyed as an immersion in mood.  In typical Perkins fashion, it’s not so much about the what as the how:  one unsettling image after another placed along a deceptively simple thread, with a strange processional logic.  The result is uncanny in a genuine sense:  it unsettles us with its familiarity, and how that familiarity is made strange again.

The bones of the story could be those of any one of those serial killer yarns released in the 1990s and early 2000s — not only The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Seven (1995), but also imitators like The Bone Collector (1999) or Taking Lives (2004), as well as hybrid items like Fallen (1998) or even The Exorcist III (1990), which literalised the latent satanic associations of the serial killer figure.

Here, our heroine is FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), and her adversary is a shadowy figure identified only as ‘Longlegs’, who murders families — or perhaps causes them to be murdered with hypnosis, or magic, or something else.  It’s not a spoiler to reveal that this character, when he is finally revealed, is played by Nicolas Cage.  Nor is it a spoiler, for anybody who has ever seen a Nicolas Cage film, that this performance is something of a ‘big swing’.  The details, however, are best discovered in real time.

Perkins is an authentically strange stylist of the American Gothic, although his films have tended to go under-appreciated until now.  Longlegs is probably his most accessible film — as well as the one with the biggest marketing push — and it seems likely to nudge him closer to multiplex appreciation.  This is a good thing.  His filmmaking is, in its way, as singular and obsessional as that of, say, Peter Strickland — although its oddness tends to be less remarked upon, perhaps because it is expressed in a horror idiom where genuine oddness is sometimes crowded out by synthetic attempts at novelty.  Longlegs probably most resembles Perkins’ first film, the 2015 possession tale The Blackcoat’s Daughter (also known as February), although by taking a more straightforward point-of-view, it doesn’t reach for quite the same weird poignancy.

Is it scary?  Well, yes.  It’s more a pervasive ambient scariness than a jump-out-of-the-seat kind, though.  The rigorous visual compositions and skin-crawling sound design are all filled with malevolent intent, and the film is determined to spook us at every turn.  In that, it has an eagerness to deliver that comes across as perversely lovable.

The performances are strong too:  particularly Monroe, who makes something vulnerable of her character’s muted interiority, and Alicia Witt, who musters some very memorable scenes as her mother.  For much of his screen time, Cage is more an effect than anything else, but even within his grandiosity, there are disquietingly subtle notes — hints of the pain and loneliness that can transform a misfit into a monster, even without the intervention of the devil himself.