Photo by The serial-killer thriller Longlegs will terrify you in so many unexpected ways. Plus, it’s a brilliant showcase for Nicolas Cage as a zealous maniac.
Longlegs, a character unlike any other.
The writer/director Osgood Perkins creates horror in unholy irrationality, and Longlegs is no exception. Dreamily recalling The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon, Zodiac, Seven, and Psycho, this saga of Satanic secrets and mommy dearests pulsates with nasty, misshapen malevolence. From its chilling opening to its deviant finale, Perkins’s thriller grows fouler and scarier with each step toward damnation.
In 1974, a young girl colors at her bedroom desk. Through her window, she spies a station wagon parked at the end of the driveway leading to her remote rural home. Donning a winter coat and a scarf, she investigates, and notices the shape of a person in the passenger seat.
Startled by a voice behind her, she turns and walks back across the yard, at which point she encounters a figure in white jeans, a matching denim jacket, long silver locks, and a seemingly deformed face whose lower half is all that Perkins reveals.
This man says something about the girl’s birthday and wearing longlegs, and then bends down and shrieks in a burst of psychotic hysteria that’s as startling as the immediate appearance of the film’s title card.
A character driven by unholy irrationality.
Longlegs won’t contextualize this prologue until much later, since it promptly segues to Oregon in the 1990s, with FBI special agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) and her colleagues being ordered out into the field to knock on doors in search of a wanted criminal.
In a cluster of cookie-cutter houses, Lee stares at rooftops and the sky as if in a daze, and a driveway entrance’s spraypainted “Visitor” marks her as an interloper in her target’s killing field.
Perkins’s film is a thriller that grows fouler and scarier with each step toward damnation, as well as providing an unforgettable showcase for Nicolas Cage as a zealous maniac unlike any other.
FBI special agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is a woman at a perpetual, icy remove, and her detachment from her environment and her fellow humans - such as Carter’s young daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders), to whose birthday party she’s invited - heightens the sense that an illogical and unstoppable evil lurks just around the corner.
Sinister whispers on the wind foreshadow potential danger, and schizoid visions of snakes suggest devilish forces at play.
Perkins complements those devices with serpentine camerawork and expansive widescreen compositions that isolate his protagonist in the frame.
Longlegs affects a procedural pose but its mysteries are more profane, and its destination more insane, than its early going intimates.
Harker’s sleuthing turns up archaic symbols and calendar-related patterns that, when put together, point toward ritualistic Satanic ugliness, all of which stands in stark contrast to the reminders by Harker’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) to steadfastly pray.
Still, Harker has more pressing issues than her relative, such as a weird conversation with Longlegs’ lone survivor (Kiernan Shipka) and a preceding visit to the girl’s farm, where she and Carter discover a buried doll with one of the killer’s trademark missives.
The more Harker uncovers, the less she grasps, and Longlegs plays a similarly canny game, introducing a variety of familiar elements and then warping them into something strange and incomprehensible.
Nothing makes total sense in the best way possible, with Perkins unnerving through opacity.
Things don’t become lucid even once Harker and Carter get their hands on Longlegs and sit him down for an interview under the glaring fluorescent light of an interrogation room.
Melding the fragmentary lunacy (and trifurcated structure) of The Blackcoat’s Daughter with the fairy tale wickedness of Gretel & Hansel, the director embraces the darkness - which, it turns out, is where Longlegs claims his partner, “Mr. Downstairs,” dwells.
Perkins smartly implies more than he explains, and that’s doubly true of Cage’s performance as the title character, whose face is hidden from view for the film’s first half and resembles an apparent mask that feels designed to conceal a truly unspeakable and unfathomable reality.
Whether shrilly singing a recognizable ditty, sitting silently in his grungy workshop lair, or praising his great master of deception, Longlegs is less a child of this Earth than a creature of malicious myth, and Cage strikes an ideally unhinged cord as the specter, whose motives and machinations remain frightfully difficult to decipher.
Cage’s performance is a terrifying tour de force.
Longlegs’ concluding revelations cast it as a story of maternal sacrifice and sin, and the fine line separating selflessness and monstrousness. It contends that to protect often means to destroy, and that even in the best of circumstances, doing either results in doom.
The fine line separating selflessness and monstrousness is terrifyingly thin.
