Review: LONGLEGS

 by Rob DiCristino

"Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?"

"And Nicolas Cage as Longlegs," reads a jagged, washed-out title card at the head of Osgood Perkins’ new thriller of the same name. Though innocuous enough a statement on its own, it’s irresistible catnip for genre fans who have followed the former A-lister’s late-career evolution into cinema’s foremost icon of eccentricity; cock-eyed, left-handed, and undeniably fearless performances in indie darlings like Pig, Mandy, and Color Out of Space have given Cage permission to let his freak flag fly without worrying about the box office repercussions, and — perhaps more importantly — given all of us an invaluable opportunity to get our own freak on right along with him. It almost doesn’t matter who or what Longlegs is; he’s called “Longlegs,” which is awesome, and Cage is in the role, which means a healthy contingent of Film Twitter will line up to see what new flavor the actor will serve up next. Producing and starring in Longlegs, Cage brings us a pasty, Satan-worshiping serial killer, an inscrutable madman who infects innocent souls with the wrath of the devil.

Those expecting full-on Cage Rage à la Vampire’s Kiss will be disappointed, however, as Longlegs is first and foremost the story of Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, whose fantastic turns in It Follows and The Guest have quickly elevated her to horror icon status), a rookie FBI agent with a preternatural instinct for spotting the clues buried under even the grizzliest crime scenes. Poe-faced and severe, Harker has made few friends on the force, but her knack for police work has quickly endeared her to Agent Carter (a droll and delightful Blair Underwood), who tasks her with her first big case: A string of domestic murder-suicides has haunted the Pacific Northwest over the last thirty years, curious incidents in which otherwise-devout suburban husbands brutally execute their entire family. There are no patterns to speak of: The murder weapons are different. The victims do not seem to know each other. No DNA or forensic connections persist. The only linking thread is a message found at each scene, a series of cryptic ciphers accompanied by the word “Longlegs.”

But if the husbands are swinging the literal and figurative axes, then does this “Longlegs” have any tangible involvement or hold any real responsibility? The answer may be far more disturbing — and far more personal — than Harker could have ever imagined, but the murder mystery trappings are only part of what Osgood Perkins is after in Longlegs. Building on early efforts like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, the acclaimed horror prodigy mixes a whole galaxy of genre influences to bring us his most confident and accomplished project yet, a deeply unsettling exercise in atmospheric dread that stabs so mercilessly at our illusions of safety that we’ll feel furtive stares from unknown eyes for weeks to come. Though Cage has embodied his fair share of malevolent specters — a premise played for comedy, in fact, in last year’s uneven but interesting Dream Scenario — Longlegs knows that no performance can match the horrors of the unknown, that creeping suspicion that something is hiding just around every corner.

That pervasive discomfort is Perkins’ bread and butter, and it’s his own preternatural skill for composition — aided by cinematographer Andres Arochi’s unnervingly short lenses and composer Zilgi’s (a pseudonym for Perkins’ brother Elvis, who scored his previous films) droning, Kubrickian score — that keeps Longlegs humming throughout its strongest passages. Like The Silence of the Lambs’ Clarice Starling before her, Lee Harker seems more afraid to be alone with herself than with the bloodthirsty killer she’s pursuing, and the film is at its best when it's exploiting that insecurity and dissecting its roots — a very welcome Alicia Witt stars as Lee’s religious recluse of a mother — as she unravels the mystery before her. Dissection is a delicate beast, though, and Longlegs runs into trouble in a messy and overeager last act that clouds much of its elegant ambiguity with exactly the kind of needless exposition and grating subplots — Haunted dolls? Really? — that Perkins’ screenplay was so adept at circumventing until then. Though never catastrophic, these cheaper turns keep Longlegs from being the masterpiece it could and probably should be.

Masterpiece or not, Longlegs is sure to stand out in a lackluster summer that could use a whole hell of a lot more of its intricacy and invention. Monroe, Witt, and Underwood are acutely tuned to Perkins’ frequency, and a haunting cameo from The Blackcoat’s Daughter star Kiernan Shipka as Longlegs’ only surviving victim ices what was already a rich and delectable cake. Nicolas Cage goes for the scenery and largely succeeds, but again, the most horrifying bits in Longlegs aren’t supernatural; they’re ethereal. They’re in the spaces where Longlegs isn’t hiding, the corners of the frame our eyes dart to just to make sure he isn’t watching us. It’s in assuring us of his absence, though, that Osgood Perkins forces us to confront our own complicity in the horrors that infect the world around us, deftly bringing us back to one of his most pressing questions: If the killer isn’t killing, then why are these people dead? What’s inside of them — and, we fear, inside of us — that could be so vicious? Most urgently, most desperately of all: Can we get rid of it? Will it ever leave us alone?

Longlegs is in theaters now.