Author/director Osgood Perkins made his title with atmospheric horror movies like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Fairly Factor That Lives within the Home. Together with his newest, Longlegs, he crafts a commendably eerie ambiance by which Nicolas Cage, who additionally produces, delivers yet one more gonzo efficiency — however it’s all texture, and never a lot else.
Longlegs’ premise is harking back to The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme’s horror drama a few younger and underestimated feminine FBI agent on the hunt for an elusive serial killer. Perkins has been specific about this connection — and his hope for Longlegs to be in dialog with Demme’s traditional — however a morass of different influences makes for a muddy film. It is as if the author/director is throwing concepts on the yarn wall to see what sticks.
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This slew of acquainted horror hallmarks — from creepy dolls to haunted barns to hints of demonic possession — usually causes Longlegs to unfold with an eerie dream logic, which is maybe when the film is at its only. Nevertheless, it continually returns to its heroine’s grounded homicide thriller, with twists and turns anchored in literal clues and sleuthing that requires disappointingly little ability, given how the solutions to every thriller merely current themselves relatively than being rigorously uncovered. This detective saga is rarely as enrapturing because the film’s ethereal detours. Whereas Perkins’ trippy visible method may grip you from time to time, its most deliberately jarring scenes are simply as fast to launch you from their pressure, yielding an aesthetic experiment that shortly goes awry.
Longlegs is lazy in its prison 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) within the Nineteen Nineties. A novice agent with a seeming sixth sense, she’s the final hope for cracking the case, which has had the company confounded by its string of ongoing grisly home murders.
Because the movie unfolds, the reserved Harker impresses her boss and pseudo father determine Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), however can be pressured to face hidden and forgotten components of her previous by confronting her uber-religious mom (Alicia Witt), with whom she shares a personable however uneasy relationship. Whereas these uncommon household bonds make for fertile dramatic floor, the movie doesn’t take full thematic benefit of them, opting as a substitute for a extra blinkered deal with the main points of every case.
Blair Underwood performs Agent Carter in “Longlegs.”
Credit score: Neon
The homicide victims are often households of three or 4, and the deaths look like instances of coerced murder-suicides, carried out by the respective patriarchs on their daughters’ birthdays. Had been it not for the signed and coded letters left behind by Longlegs at every crime scene, the FBI won’t have recognized these killings had been related in any respect. Lee appears for clues and connective tissue in surprising locations, just like the dates of sure crimes, although the film seldom permits her to chase down forensic leads, and her seeming psychic talents come into play far lower than one may count on.
Perkins’ screenplay does not function Lee chasing down proof. As an alternative, Longlegs himself — who is aware of extra about Lee than she is aware of about him — drops off clues at her distant cabin, toying along with her by coded letters. This makes for an intriguing wrinkle to their cat-and-mouse sport, leading to a couple of intense moments when Longlegs is threateningly shut by. Nevertheless, it additionally halts the film’s momentum as a dramatic procedural. There’s little sense of the protagonist’s progress or autonomy as she waits round for one more supply.
Serial killer thriller will get combined with satanism and the supernatural, and an excessive amount of extra.
Given his methodology, Longlegs is a component Zodiac Killer, half Prison Minds villain-of-the-week, however because the movie unfolds, it reveals quite a few different horror entanglements. These aren’t inherently unworkable when tossed collectively. The issue is that Perkins leaves his style blender working too lengthy, leading to conceptual sludge.
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Maika Monroe performs Agent Lee Harker in “Longlegs.”
Credit score: Neon
There could also be non secular and satanic components to those killings, which quickly paves the best way for different attainable horror culprits starting from the supernatural to cults to the satan himself, and just about each trope you may conjure. The result’s an imbalanced subgenre mishmash that whips forwards and backwards between a number of parallel explanations for the killings (and labyrinthine numerology clues), as a substitute of letting its characters and performances take the lead.
Nicolas Cage is sensible in Longlegs, however short-changed.
The movie’s nerve-racking trailers have successfully hidden Cage’s look, which is an method the film takes as effectively, and with good purpose. Like a creature-feature monster, Longlegs is just proven for a couple of frames at a time at first, shrouding him and his murders in a surreal thriller. That is an efficient method to creating you query whether or not or not you’ve got totally seen or understood him — made all of the extra impactful by Cage’s work when he is finally revealed.
The actor’s devious on-screen creation pushes the bounds of cinematic believability, together with his powdered face, uncanny prosthetics, and pitched-up voice. He primarily performs a caricature of an effeminate-serial-killer throwback, à la Buffalo Invoice (Ted Levine) in The Silence of the Lambs, or Norman Bates in Psycho (the position made well-known by the director’s father, Anthony Perkins), albeit with out the iffy, outdated transgender entanglements — for higher or worse.
Maika Monroe performs Agent Lee Harker in “Longlegs.”
Credit score: Neon
The movie does not find yourself changing this regressive stereotype with something resembling recognizable motive or psychology, leaving Cage to understand at straws together with his showiness. Longlegs is troublingly magnetic, however his draw is totally Cage-centric — even below prosthetics that make him unrecognizable. Earlier than lengthy, making an attempt to catch glimpses of Longlegs turns into about having fun with what crazy choices Cage may make as a performer, from hunched-over physique language to sudden, high-pitched wailing. It’s a enjoyable efficiency showcase, however few of Cage’s decisions in crafting this character have a lot bearing on how the movie performs out. The place Levine’s quirks as Buffalo Invoice had been a part of a thematic continuum — a determined search to turn into entire, even by violent means — Cage might’ve simply as simply made a dozen totally different, equally weird decisions with out impacting the story.
Osgood Perkins undermines Maika Monroe by script and cinematography.
If Cage’s over-the-top method is undercut as a result of lack of discernible story anchor, then Monroe’s quietly thought of efficiency — sensible for equal and reverse causes — is equally undone. Her stern silence harbors a suppressed nervousness and unease, which, in line with her supposed sixth sense, hints at what’s actually at play with these Longlegs murders. Nevertheless, there’s nowhere for Monroe to go from this place to begin, and nothing on which to venture or mirror her disturbed sense of thoughts in order that it turns into dramatically fertile. She’s stagnant on this purgatory. That is partially as a result of the movie’s aesthetic method stays static from the phrase go. It does not evolve to seize Lee’s evolving emotional dimensions.
Longlegs begins out with a marvelously conceived visible method. Its widescreen body homes flashbacks inside a narrower, extra photographic 4:3 side ratio, a visible mode that successfully disorients the viewer when it begins getting used to disclose data that does not seem to be it might moderately be a part of any character’s reminiscence. Together with temporary flashes of snakes and close-ups of crimson and gooey materials, this creates a visceral sense of unpredictability at first, enveloping Lee’s waking moments in nightmarish imagery. Nevertheless, Perkins finally ends up repeating these tips so many occasions — and with none sense of development — that this effectively shortly runs dry.
Perkins and cinematographer Andrés Arochi make use of vast lenses to warp the area round Lee throughout each stillness and motion, which works wonders throughout vast photographs of teams in dialog, and throughout the occasional chase scene (the setting whizzes by). Nevertheless, this visible M.O. by no means adjustments, even when the story calls for it. The film, within the course of, very not often captures a way of intimacy or introspection. There’s one exception to this — Kiernan Shipka, in a minor supporting half, is remoted from the background utilizing the gentle focus of telephoto lenses as she delivers a chilling monologue — however no such method is ever utilized to Lee herself. She all the time appears like a fixture of the film’s backdrop relatively than an emotional centerpiece.
Lauren Acala performs younger Lee Harker.
Credit score: Neon
In The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling’s hurdles as a girl within the FBI had been made crystal clear by blocking and framing — with strategies so simple as having her male colleagues tower over her and glare at her dismissively — however Longlegs explains all this in phrases, and its blocking is rarely as thoughtfully thought of. Its body is often empty aside from Lee, even when it is not utilizing that vacancy for any logistical or psychological function.
When Longlegs reaches its emotional climax — set throughout a scene of mundane domesticity turned on its head — its visible method feels equally flimsy. The film’s quite a few gestures towards framing acquainted photographs of nuclear household as chilling or harmful don’t pack almost as a lot of a punch as they should. The story tends to skip previous this theme as quickly because it’s launched, and its visible presentation doesn’t function almost sufficient visible distinction, both. Slightly than subverting the in any other case stark palette by vivid and sunny hues, the lighting merely turns into flat and indecisive — which, sadly, represents the film’s bigger issues in microcosm. It doesn’t totally (and even partway) decide to its most bone-chilling concepts.
Whereas its use of framing is initially efficient, Longlegs shortly rests on its laurels, and swerves helter-skelter looking for new methods to unnerve. Regardless of hitting a couple of hair-raising particular person notes, the movie’s rhythm is rarely really disturbing. The additional it goes on, the extra it fails to seize the attention, or the creativeness — not to mention each together. Altogether, Longlegs is an empty movie; not within the sense that peering beneath its floor reveals a terrifying void, however relatively, in that it betrays an absence of that means altogether.
