'Longlegs' review: Nicolas Cage may be brilliant, but this horror-thriller is bizarre in the wrong way
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Writer/director Osgood Perkins made his name with atmospheric horror films like The Blackcoat's Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. With his latest, Longlegs, he crafts a commendably eerie atmosphere in which Nicolas Cage, who also produces, delivers yet another gonzo performance — but it's all texture, and not much else.
Longlegs’ premise is reminiscent of The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme's horror drama about a young and underestimated female FBI agent on the hunt for an elusive serial killer. Perkins has been explicit about this connection — and his hope for Longlegs to be in conversation with Demme’s classic — but a morass of other influences makes for a muddy movie. It's as if the writer/director is throwing ideas at the yarn wall to see what sticks.
This slew of familiar horror hallmarks — from creepy dolls to haunted barns to hints of demonic possession — often causes Longlegs to unfold with an eerie dream logic, which is perhaps when the movie is at its most effective. However, it constantly returns to its heroine's grounded murder mystery, with twists and turns anchored in literal clues and sleuthing that requires disappointingly little skill, given how the answers to each mystery simply present themselves rather than being carefully uncovered. This detective saga is never as enrapturing as the movie's ethereal detours. While Perkins' trippy visual approach might grip you on occasion, its most intentionally jarring scenes are just as quick to release you from their tension, yielding an aesthetic experiment that quickly goes awry.
Longlegs is lazy in its criminal investigation.
A chilling prologue reveals a fleeting glimpse of Cage's Longlegs — a pale, puffy-faced, distinctly clownish killer in a vaguely '70s-ish setting. The premise then shifts focus to the FBI's Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) in the 1990s. A novice agent with a seeming sixth sense, she's the last hope for cracking the case, which has had the agency confounded by its string of ongoing grisly domestic murders.
As the film unfolds, the reserved Harker impresses her boss and pseudo father figure Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), but is also forced to face hidden and forgotten elements of her past by confronting her uber-religious mother (Alicia Witt), with whom she shares a personable but uneasy relationship. While these unusual family bonds make for fertile dramatic ground, the film doesn’t take full thematic advantage of them, opting instead for a more blinkered focus on the details of each case.
Blair Underwood plays Agent Carter in "Longlegs." Credit: Neon
The murder victims are usually families of three or four, and the deaths appear to be cases of coerced murder-suicides, carried out by the respective patriarchs on their daughters’ birthdays. Were it not for the signed and coded letters left behind by Longlegs at each crime scene, the FBI might not have known these killings were connected at all. Lee looks for clues and connective tissue in unexpected places, like the dates of certain crimes, though the movie seldom allows her to chase down forensic leads, and her seeming psychic abilities come into play far less than one might expect.
Perkins' screenplay doesn't feature Lee chasing down evidence. Instead, Longlegs himself — who knows more about Lee than she knows about him — drops off clues at her remote cabin, toying with her through coded letters. This makes for an intriguing wrinkle to their cat-and-mouse game, resulting in a few intense moments when Longlegs is threateningly close by. However, it also halts the movie's momentum as a dramatic procedural. There's little sense of the protagonist's progress or autonomy as she waits around for another delivery.
Serial killer thriller gets mixed with satanism and the supernatural, and too much more.
Given his methodology, Longlegs is part Zodiac Killer, part Criminal Minds villain-of-the-week, but as the film unfolds, it reveals a number of other horror entanglements. These aren't inherently unworkable when tossed together. The problem is that Perkins leaves his genre blender running too long, resulting in conceptual sludge.
Maika Monroe plays Agent Lee Harker in "Longlegs." Credit: Neon
There may be religious and satanic elements to these killings, which soon paves the way for other possible horror culprits ranging from the supernatural to cults to the devil himself, and pretty much every trope you can conjure. The result is an imbalanced subgenre mishmash that whips back and forth between several parallel explanations for the killings (and labyrinthine numerology clues), instead of letting its characters and performances take the lead.
Nicolas Cage is brilliant in Longlegs, but short-changed.
The film's nerve-racking trailers have effectively hidden Cage's appearance, which is an approach the movie takes as well, and with good reason. Like a creature-feature monster, Longlegs is only shown for a few frames at a time at first, shrouding him and his murders in a surreal mystery. This is an effective approach to making you question whether or not you've fully seen or understood him — made all the more impactful by Cage's work when he's eventually revealed.
The actor’s devious on-screen creation pushes the limits of cinematic believability, with his powdered face, uncanny prosthetics, and pitched-up voice. He essentially plays a caricature of an effeminate-serial-killer throwback, à la Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) in The Silence of the Lambs, or Norman Bates in Psycho (the role made famous by the director's father, Anthony Perkins), albeit without the iffy, outdated transgender entanglements — for better or worse.
Maika Monroe plays Agent Lee Harker in "Longlegs." Credit: Neon
The film doesn't end up replacing this regressive stereotype with anything resembling recognizable motive or psychology, leaving Cage to grasp at straws with his showiness. Longlegs is troublingly magnetic, but his draw is entirely Cage-centric — even under prosthetics that make him unrecognizable. Before long, trying to catch glimpses of Longlegs becomes about enjoying what loopy decisions Cage might make as a performer, from hunched-over body language to sudden, high-pitched wailing. It’s a fun performance showcase, but few of Cage’s choices in crafting this character have much bearing on how the film plays out. Where Levine’s quirks as Buffalo Bill were part of a thematic continuum — a desperate search to become whole, even through violent means — Cage could’ve just as easily made a dozen different, equally bizarre choices without impacting the story.
Osgood Perkins undermines Maika Monroe through script and cinematography.
If Cage's over-the-top approach is undercut due to the lack of discernible story anchor, then Monroe's quietly considered performance — brilliant for equal and opposite reasons — is similarly undone. Her stern silence harbors a suppressed anxiety and unease, which, in keeping with her supposed sixth sense, hints at what's really at play with these Longlegs murders. However, there's nowhere for Monroe to go from this starting point, and nothing on which to project or reflect her disturbed sense of mind so that it becomes dramatically fertile. She's stagnant in this purgatory. This is partially because the film's aesthetic approach remains static from the word go. It doesn't evolve to capture Lee's evolving emotional dimensions.
Longlegs starts out with a marvelously conceived visual approach. Its widescreen frame houses flashbacks within a narrower, more photographic 4:3 aspect ratio, a visual mode that effectively disorients the viewer when it starts being used to reveal information that doesn't seem like it could reasonably be part of any character's memory. Along with brief flashes of snakes and close-ups of red and gooey material, this creates a visceral sense of unpredictability at first, enveloping Lee’s waking moments in nightmarish imagery. However, Perkins ends up repeating these tricks so many times — and without any sense of progression — that this well quickly runs dry.
Perkins and cinematographer Andrés Arochi employ wide lenses to warp the space around Lee during both stillness and movement, which works wonders during wide shots of groups in conversation, and during the occasional chase scene (the environment whizzes by). However, this visual M.O. never changes, even when the story demands it. The movie, in the process, very rarely captures a sense of intimacy or introspection. There's one exception to this — Kiernan Shipka, in a minor supporting part, is isolated from the background using the soft focus of telephoto lenses as she delivers a chilling monologue — but no such approach is ever applied to Lee herself. She always feels like a fixture of the movie's backdrop rather than an emotional centerpiece.
Lauren Acala plays young Lee Harker. Credit: Neon
In The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling's hurdles as a woman in the FBI were made crystal clear through blocking and framing — with methods as simple as having her male colleagues tower over her and glare at her dismissively — but Longlegs explains all this in words, and its blocking is never as thoughtfully considered. Its frame is usually empty except for Lee, even when it isn't using that emptiness for any logistical or psychological purpose.
When Longlegs reaches its emotional climax — set during a scene of mundane domesticity turned on its head — its visual approach feels similarly flimsy. The movie’s numerous gestures toward framing familiar images of nuclear family as chilling or dangerous don’t pack nearly as much of a punch as they ought to. The story tends to skip past this theme as soon as it’s introduced, and its visual presentation doesn’t feature nearly enough visual contrast, either. Rather than subverting the otherwise stark palette through bright and sunny hues, the lighting simply becomes flat and indecisive — which, unfortunately, represents the movie’s larger problems in microcosm. It doesn’t fully (or even partway) commit to its most bone-chilling ideas.
While its use of framing is initially effective, Longlegs quickly rests on its laurels, and swerves helter-skelter in search of new ways to unnerve. Despite hitting a few hair-raising individual notes, the film's rhythm is never truly disturbing. The further it goes on, the more it fails to capture the eye, or the imagination — let alone both in combination. Altogether, Longlegs is an empty film; not in the sense that peering beneath its surface reveals a terrifying void, but rather, in that it betrays a lack of meaning altogether.
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