LONGLEGS - Mark Reviews Movies

Longlegs, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 11, 2024

From its opening scene, Longlegs puts us off-kilter. The plot of writer/director Osgood Perkins' film is nothing new or different, since it's essentially a thriller about the hunt for a serial killer, who has evaded capture while apparently being responsible for the deaths of ten families. How this man kills, by the way, is one of the central mysteries of the story, since no one has found physical evidence or heard eyewitness testimony of him being present when these murders take place. There is something very, very wrong going on here.

Perkins dives into that sensation from the start, during a prologue that's set during an uncertain time, in an unspecified place, and amidst characters whose identities are cagily obscured from us. All we know is that a car pulls up to an isolated house on the outskirts of a forest, parks along the empty road where no other traffic is present because of the secluded nature of the place and the recent snowfall, and just sits there. A little girl, home alone in her room, spots the vehicle, puts on her winter garments, and heads outside to inspect it.

It's not just the setting, the vulnerability of this child, and what happens after the girl hears a strange noise behind the house that make this scene unsettling. Perkins and cinematographer Andrews Arochi also film the sequence in a small, boxy aspect ratio, reminiscent of a home movie captured on 16 mm film.

The visual gives one a sense of a found piece of media that, based on the sudden appearance of a man whose face is intentionally obscured by the framing and the low-to-the-ground perspective of a little girl, was never intended to be found. When killer's work is shown throughout the story, the filmmakers return to that style, and by the sheer nature of the aesthetic, the buildup to those flashes of violence, as well as the violence itself, feels even more unnerving than it otherwise might have been.

Perkins is very much in control of the atmosphere here. It creeps into one's mind and under one's skin in such a way that it's easy to forgive the plot its formula, the characters their shallowness, one performance its unnecessary and unfortunate flamboyance, and the third act its shift into completely different narrative terrain. One could easily pick apart all of the obvious flaws in the mechanics of Perkins' storytelling, but to do so would be overlook the filmmakers' meticulous command of suspense, surprise, and creating that unique sensation of watching something that feels as if we shouldn't be witnessing it.

The plot itself is set at some point in the 1990s and follows FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who is new-ish to Bureau and proves her talent for deduction during a routine canvassing of a neighborhood in the search for a different killer. There's a moment of violence here that's as shocking as the abrupt appearance of the strange man behind the little girl's house in the prologue, because Perkins knows the build-up might be more important to the success of a scare than the payoff itself.

As such, the whole of the narrative is essentially one long build-up, filled with smaller sequences of tension and unease, such as when Harker finds herself back home in a remote log cabin in the woods after a long day and night of going over the case file of the enigmatic killer of ten families. Since her investigative instincts are so honed, Harker's boss Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) assigns her to help him track down the serial murderer, who sends cryptographic messages that no one in law enforcement has been able to decipher and signs them all "Longlegs."

One such message appears on the desk of Harker's home office, following a scene that uses sound and silence and shadow and silhouettes moving in the background to great effect. Harker breaks Longlegs' code, with a little aid from the killer, but the message warns her not to explain to anyone how she accomplished that, using a threat against the agent's mother (played by Alicia Witt) as leverage.

The rest of this is standard stuff. Harker begins to find patterns in the killings, which all happen within six days of the birthday—always on the 14th of any month—of a child in the targeted families. She and Carter investigate old and new crime scenes, where clues are hidden and bodies have been rotting for a month before anyone noticed one family's absence, and is that a figure moving along the dark horizon of a farmhouse, just a trick of the mind, or some intentionally subliminal effect on Perkins' part?

Most horror movies give us a firm model of alternating between scare scenes and respites from them. For all of the familiarity of this broad plot, though, this one offers no such reprieve, because Perkins trains us to be on guard at every given moment.

That alone means the film is some kind of success, even if the plotting becomes ungainly by the third act (Important details that the case revolves around are kept hidden, even though one would imagine they'd come up in a conversation about, for example, birthdays, and the climax does far too much explaining for an answer that's probably best left mysterious). There's also the killer, who appears occasionally scheming and planning. Perkins knows that less is more with this figure, but in playing the role, Nicolas Cage, under a lot of pasty prosthetics, gives so much "more" that there's simply no room for "less" in the equation.

Still, to focus on the shortcomings of a deliberately barebones plot would be doing a disservice to Perkins' real accomplishment with Longlegs. It's creepy and chilling in such a persistent way that its very existence feels threatening.

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