Review: Longlegs

Director:  Osgood Perkins

Stars:  Maika Monroe, Kiernan Shipka, Alicia Witt

It’s something of a relief to say it – and it probably isn’t true dammit – but the ’80s are so over. At last (y’know, hopefully).

Fun as it was there for a while, the 25-year coddling of the decade long since outstayed its welcome, with the horror pastiches particularly running on empty this last ten years or so.

It’s finally time, yes!, for the ’90s.

Truth be told, horror wasn’t firing on all cylinders in the ’90s, but portions of it grew legs (long legs, if you will) and ran amuck in theatres, bent into the form of the serial killer thriller. Jonathan Demme made The Silence of the Lambs such an adept, technically absorbing procedural that it became one of very few horror movies to court Oscar. A few years later, David Fincher so-successfully defined the subgenre with Se7en that everyone else got stuck in neutral trying to copy him. These two totems of pop culture have lasted since then. Through the decades, through the detritus, through the fads. They’re still watched with frequency today.

Osgood ‘Oz’ Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins) has been one of the most consistently under-sung indie horror filmmakers of the past ten years or more, dutifully trotting out impeccably self-serious and oppressive chillers, from highwater mark The Blackcoat’s Daughter (also known as February in some territories and overdue a Why I Love… essay on here) through to his bitterly overlooked fairy tale skewering Gretel & Hansel. Perkins is the hipster’s Robert Eggers (to put it incredibly redundantly). Thanks to it’s own quality and some truly masterful promo work, Longlegs is his overdue coming-out party, and an appreciative grandchild of Demme and Fincher.

This is no pastiche, however. Or, at least, not foremost. Perkins’ established fingerprints are all over this.

Lee Harker (modern horror royalty Maika Monroe) is young to be a Special Agent with the FBI, but she has distinguished herself through her acute gift, an intuition bordering on the psychic. Paired with Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) after her partner is suddenly shot and killed while canvasing for a suspect, Lee is brought aboard a decades-spanning serial murder case to offer fresh eyes. The case is highly unusual. A string of domestic killings in which family members violently offed one another. Seeming murder-suicides all linked by cryptic ciphers left at the scene by an unknown third party calling themselves ‘Longlegs’. Can Lee decipher a method or meaning in this madness?

Of course the answer is yes, but Perkins spends the opening chapters of his film bedding us into his heightened, dreamlike version of a police procedural, applying what I’m loathe to describe as an ‘A24 modus operandi’ to the serial killer thriller. Perkins expertly creates a kind of tunnel vision, warping the perspective of the film to Lee’s analytical eye. She’s a very mannered person. Almost robotic, suggestive of a strict or rigorous upbringing, or self-imposed discipline. Her relationship with her doting, worrisome mother (Alicia Witt) is strained. And it comes to feel as though she has a personal connection to the serial murders. Something suppressed. A memory like a locked door in an old family home.

The marketing has been coy about revealing the film’s titular antagonist, played by producer Nicolas Cage. Masked in make-up, the largess of his memeification is still identifiable, but Longlegs works best if you sign a pact with Perkins and try to disassociate Cage and his celebrity and focus on the character he’s funnelled himself into. It’ll be make-or-break for some; the element that might shatter Perkins’ otherwise calculated atmosphere. And Longlegs wobbles on a tightrope at times. But, for this viewer, suspending disbelief – going all in, buying into Cage – was the only way to go. A little goes an awfully long way here and Perkins uses him judiciously.

As off-the-wall and singular as Cage is, this is Monroe’s film and she creates something fragile but precise, cold but heroic in Lee Harker. It’s miles away from Monroe’s other most memorable performances in the likes of It Follows, Watcher or The Guest, and goes to show she still has more to offer than we’ve already seen.

Perkins seems like someone who’d be lethal in a staring contest. Between this and his prior films there’s not a flinch, not a flicker in his persistent tonal control, but Longlegs also benefits from a slyly buried sense of humour played as straight as everything else. An early sequence in which Lee’s psychic abilities are tested by the FBI is ludicrous. Comically sci-fi brained. But it is played with such rigor that it sails through. Slowly piling on more and more overtly supernatural elements, the tale comes to feel as ridiculously farfetched as an entry in the Conjuring universe. And, really, it’s not so far removed from an Annabelle or even an Insidious. But it’s the method that marks it out, and Perkins’ stamp is so incisive that it all lands. Not only that, its riveting.

There are jumps of kinds. Stings, really. Punctuation where something of the past is thrust upon us, like an attack of PTSD. But really, the grip is sustained, enhanced by the sense of incomprehensible mystery; the how of how this all hangs together. If there’s a real perilous move, its Perkins’ inclination to over-explain once his unhinged third act rattles around. Where something like The Blackcoat’s Daughter laid the pieces out for you to assemble, Longlegs is ultimately explicit, forming itself into something defined yet still consuming. Some of its turns and revelations are quite obvious, guessable. The identity of [redacted]. The [redacted redacted] finale. But its not the telling so much as the manner of communication that is compelling. That makes this one feel suffused with the evils it imagines. It’s just another fairy tale. Just another kind of folklore. The dressing is a little more contemporary is all.

And, not for nothing, only George Miller knows how to make fixed-camera driving scenes feel this unhinged.