Following on from an ingenious marketing campaign, the year’s buzziest horror has arrived with its eye on the past.
★★★☆☆
For all the distinctly modern tools used to build the momentum of its hype machine, Osgood Perkins’ latest chiller is an old-fashioned affair at heart. A killer is on the loose, leaving behind a stream of coded messages that hint at a force near-elemental in its faceless, omnipotent evil. On the trail is a young investigator (Maika Monroe) whose unique gifts of detection appear to correlate almost directly with both her past trauma and present absence of social graces (needless to say, she is much more at ease at work than in casual conversation). A gruffly gregarious captain (Blair Underwood) steers her course, which will take her through dilapidated, near-deserted American farmland, haunted mental institutions and creaking cabins late at night. From the start, Longlegs is cheerfully content to play the hits, and Perkins takes to the genre karaoke with ease.
In his previous features, (among them The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), a tale of boarding school students haunted by the Devil, and Gretel and Hansel (2020), a distinctly gnarly riff on an oft-told tale), Perkins combined an immaculately maintained air of foreboding in tandem with an almost perverse disregard for narrative momentum. Thus, there is something refreshing about how swiftly Longlegs throws itself into the propulsive rhythms of the 90s serial killer potboilers to which it owes a clear debt. Each tough-talking sit down with the boss, ominous reading of scripture and inevitable instance of things going bang in the night feels flanked by quotation marks. Perkins knows that we’ve seen it all before, the old tropes lovingly reproduced in the spirit of good, gruesome fun. Still, as Monroe’s Agent Lee Harker comes face to face with the boogeyman she’s been seeking, the tongue-in-cheek Gothic dread begins to curdle. Is well-crafted pastiche able to become truly unnerving in its own right? And just how seriously are we meant to be taking it all? It’s a question only further confused by the arrival of the film’s marquee star.
When we finally get a closer look at Longlegs’ titular Big Bad, he proves no less of a familiar figure; a sad clown caked in ghostly, androgynous make-up, tinkering away in one of those basement lairs fictional killers always seem able to come by. He is also quite unmistakably played by Nicolas Cage. Stubbornly idiosyncratic though he may be, the possibility of this most memed of stars ever leaving himself behind onscreen has long been removed from the equation. When a surfeit of audience chuckles greet Cage’s every outsize gesture and singsong vocal fluctuation, the response feels almost obligatory.
However, even without the energy brought by audiences, one wonders if Cage would still scan as simply too over-the-top to properly unsettle. His bordering-on-camp stylisations also threaten to rankle in other ways. With a fixation on T. Rex being something of a motif, Cage’s killer is effectively aligned with the figureheads on the receiving end of Satanic Panic, namely the glam rockers declared to be conduits for the occult. At times, it can be hard to tell if Perkins’ film is aligning itself with the era’s scaremongering conservatism or against it.
Throughout, Monroe proves the film’s greatest asset, the It Follows star infusing Harker’s terse introversion with an emotional tangibility that does much to offset the overly studied feel of much of the film around her. Longlegs may be crafted with a wilful knowingness regarding the tropes and tricks of the trade, but when the time comes to actually deliver the scares, the result feels too oddly airless to burrow under the skin. Like DP Andres Arochi’s images, the whole of the film is eerily haunting in theory, but feels too carefully fussed over—too devoid of an animating life force—to leave you as shaken as it ought to.
The Verdict
With its sharply honed atmosphere, a terrific anchoring performance and an enthusiastic revolving door of influences, this chewy pulp thriller is carefully crafted to a fault. But for the audience to feel truly uneasy, maybe a less steady hand on the steer was needed.
Words by Thomas Messner
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