Given his family connection to the horror genre, it should come as no surprise that Osgood Perkins would show an aptitude for horror. In the first three films that Perkins had directed – including his near-perfect first feature, The Blackcoat’s Daughter – Perkins proved himself an ambitious artist whose character-driven approach to the genre allowed him to succeed with streamers and studios alike. But it is Longlegs, the director’s star-studded and much-hyped horror thriller, that should make him a household name among genre fans going forward.
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After successfully apprehending a local murderer, Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is given a new assignment. Her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), explains that Oregon has been home to a serial killer for decades – and an anonymous serial killer with no overt body counts or ties to the crime scenes at that. Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) is suspected to have caused the deaths of a dozen families over the last few decades, but the only evidence the police have is encrypted letters he left at the crime scenes. For all intents and purposes, the deaths are the result of murder-suicides in seemingly normal families. Given her aptitude for the unknowable, it is now Harker’s job to find Longlegs and bring him to justice.
As an FBI agent, Harker shows flashes of an unnatural insight – what Carter is content to accept as “intuition” – that makes her the ideal candidate for the case. Soon she is able to connect the murders to another unsolved mystery and decipher the encrypted messages that have stymied the bureau. But as Longlegs circles closer to Harker’s past, the agent finds herself digging into a personal connection with the killer that her mother (Alicia Witt) may have been hiding all these years. And the truth behind the killings, once discovered, may damn them all.
Despite its billing as a horror feature, much of Longlegs operates as a police procedural. We follow Harker as she puts together the pieces of the investigation and hunts for connections between the families. We also watch as she operates in the shadow of Longlegs, who leaves little clues and encryptions littered around the crime scenes seemingly just for Harker’s eyes. Given the film’s commitment to investigation, the first-half of Longlegs can be a bit tough to figure out. Are we meant to hold this to the puzzle box logic of other crime thrillers? If not, when will we learn enough about the characters to give the storytelling its emotional edge?
The major revelation, of course, is that the procedural elements of Longlegs are more mood than forensics. Once the film embraces the satanic connection between Longlegs and his victims, we can appreciate that Harker’s investigation is – to borrow a piece of political language – meant to be taken seriously but not literally. If and how much you connect with Monroe’s performance is key, and those who appreciate good architecture in their horror movies will get great mileage from watching Harker skulk around haunting locales. Longlegs would undoubtedly benefit from repeated watchings – not because of the density of its story, but because of the richness of its images and its emphasis on tone.
Granted, if you’re going to make a mood-driven horror film, it doesn’t hurt to have Maika Monroe as your leading lady. Perkins tends to favor stories with female protagonists; he has worked with actresses ranging from Kiernan Shipka to Ruth Wilson to Sophia Lillis, but no actor feels as locked into the Perkins wavelength as Monroe. The actress has a body of genre work – It Follows, obviously, but also Watcher and Significant Other – that proves her willingness to take on real challenges. Here she is paired well with Underwood, who offers the grounded perspective needed to allow Monroe room to explore the darker sides of her character’s past.
Longlegs is also a welcome marriage between Perkins and Nicolas Cage, whose instincts for restraint and excess (respectively) are in perfect balance. Few actors are as much fun as a dialed-in Cage – but in an otherwise-muted thriller that evokes strong comparisons to the works of David Fincher, the tonal balance between minimalism and maximalism can be tricky. Thankfully, Longlegs finds a happy medium. Cage is free to lose himself in prosthetics and performance, but Perkins elects to shoot the character in fragments. We see the bottom-half of his face; a profile covered in hair; a shape lurking in the background. Cage goes big, but the movie keeps him in the margins, which makes his performance all the more sinister.
In many ways, the satanic narrative of Longlegs makes it a companion piece to Perkins’s first film. Both The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Longlegs are films about the power of the devil, of course, but lurking beneath the surface are heartbreaking explorations of agency and complicitness. Both films feature characters who do terrible things because they are fully in the thrall of a great evil, but it is the clear-eyed characters – the ones whose actions are calculated and of their own accord – that are simultaneously the film’s most haunting and tragic elements.
Perkins once told me that the monsters in his movies are only monsters because they’re in great pain. Longlegs may be a crossover feature for the director – one that places him alongside the Jordan Peeles of the world as established names in the genre – but it is also a continuation of that theme. While the director’s next film is shaping up to be a one-for-them, here’s hoping that Perkins can use Longlegs as further evidence that studios need to give him a blank check and a marketing team unafraid to let things get a bit creepy. [4/5]
