Longlegs

The Plot: It’s 1993 and there’s a serial killer on the loose in rural Oregon. Calling himself ‘Longlegs’ (Nicolas Cage), the killer has a pattern of orchestrating grisly family murders – seemingly inflicted by the father of the family with no apparent motive. The case is baffling the FBI, but Agent Harker (Maika Monroe) is onto something. Obsessed with the case and its history going back decades, she begins to decode the killer’s intentions. With the help of her boss Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), they set out to track down Longlegs and end his reign of terror…

The Verdict: Thriller/horror hybrid Longlegs arrives in a whirlwind of pre-release buzz, with Nicolas Cage’s performance reportedly freaking out test audiences so much that it might put off some people from seeing it (scaredy cats). That combined with a trailer that didn’t give away too much – a rarity these days – means that audiences might not know what to expect from it. When films like this are hyped up from across the pond, it can often lead to more muted reactions over here (The Blair Witch Project being a prime example). Thankfully, the hype is indeed justified on Longlegs. Not that it needs hype to sell its particular brand of finding the creepiness in the everyday. The film more than proves itself by standing tall and being its own particular thing – which also happens to crawl under the skin and make a home there.

Longlegs is the twisted brainchild of Osgood Perkins, son of the late Anthony Perkins who was forever associated with playing Norman Bates. His mother Berry Berenson died in the World Trade Center attacks. It’s not hard to imagine then that the double tragedy of losing his parents early on might have affected him and perhaps informed his approach towards dwelling in the darkness of the human mind. His script for Longlegs is the stuff of nightmares – family tragedies playing out again and again as the killer strikes… and then melts away into the shadows. It’s structured in the style of the great 1990s cop thrillers, with a dogged detective stopping at nothing to catch the killer. The trail warms up as Agent Harker (surely a nod to Dracula) sniffs something and gets ever closer to her monster. It’s also shot through with an American Gothic perspective by way of notorious serial killer Ed Gein – one of the inspirations for Norman Bates.

Given that heady mix of elements, Perkins gives it a good stir and then delivers a strong script from the get-go. It doubles down on its objective by setting the tone in the opening sequence and then maintaining it all the way through in three neatly-divided chapters. That’s a sustained amount of tension to hold onto, but Perkins keeps upping the ante and upending audience expectations as to where this story might be going. It’s a film that is thick in an atmosphere of dread, suggesting that there may be supernatural forces at work on either side of the fence. Perkins doesn’t overplay this though, which is to his credit. His sterling script and direction places more emphasis on the evil that lurks in plain sight or at times, just at the very edge of the camera frame. What you don’t see is more disturbing in the cinema of the mind – an old filmmaking trick that still holds water.

Maika Monroe, who has already earned her horror credentials, holds her own here as Agent Harker. It’s a committed performance that comes across as soaked in the details of the killer’s backstory. The intense Agent Harker is all about the work, but Perkins allows for some welcome flashes of light relief too. Nicolas Cage, whose performance and look as Longlegs was pared back in the publicity, is suitably menacing in an otherworldly and often inhuman way. It’s him allright, but not like we’ve seen him before. The less said, the better for audiences to discover themselves. Longlegs is a killer chiller that is spring-loaded with many different narrative traps and surprises along its bloody path. It remains laser-focused on being as unsettling and creepily effective as it can be without overplaying its severed hand. Perkins has made one of the stand-out horrors of the year, marking him as a name to watch.

Rating: 4 / 5

Review by Gareth O’Connor