"Longlegs" review — The atmosphere oozes, the case stagnates
“Oh, there she is! The almost-birthday girl!”
Agent Lee Harker hasn’t been with the FBI for very long. She’s a young detective, still getting her legs for criminal investigation and getting used to the not-very-pleasant images she and her colleagues deal with daily. Harker has a knack for intuiting information that makes her a vital asset to the FBI’s operations. One day, while out door-to-door knocking with her partner, Harker is suddenly able to identify the house of a suspect without any clues or foreknowledge. Despite the operation costing her partner’s life, she gets the arrest, unsure exactly what came over her to solve the case. Is she psychic? Maybe just extremely lucky? Whatever it is, Agent Carter, her superior officer, takes notice of Harker and brings her into an older, more dangerous case, one that will drum up dark secrets from her past and put her into contact with one of the most dangerous killers the FBI has ever hunted.
The oppressive sense of eerieness over Osgood Perkin’s Longlegs begins in the film’s earliest frames, where a snow-covered farmhouse and old 8mm film stock give us our tantalizing first glimpse at the film’s titular serial killer. Although, it’s hard to call our villain a “serial killer” by any discernable metric because the deaths never make any sense. At first glance, they all seem like tragic murder-suicides, where a god-fearing suburban father goes crazy and kills his family and himself. A seemingly cut-and-dry case that is all too common. But then there are those letters. At each crime scene, there’s a letter written on a birthday card in a coded script the FBI investigators just can’t seem to crack. There’s just one clue. At the bottom of the message, written in plain English, is a signature: “Longlegs.” The FBI has been on this case for decades now, but the seeming randomness of the attacks makes them impossible to anticipate. This, at first, unexplained footage might just be the clue needed to break the case wide open. With screeching sound design, some jarring editing, and a cold, quiet voice, the film starts to cut into the mind of the viewer, setting the stage for the cryptic small-town violence to follow.
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| Maika Monroe in Longlegs. Photo via Neon. |
If you like watching detective films in which the detective merely skims around the investigation, happens upon information, and manages to magically intuit the solution, you’ll be utterly compelled by the drama here. It’s nearly impossible to take the central mystery seriously when the film dedicates so little time to developing the challenge and the thrill of investigation. Despite the promise of the undeniably exciting hook and the aura of mystique surrounding every aspect of the story, Longlegs lets all of its energy fizzle out, failing to turn it into an interesting story. While the craft, the cinematography, the clever visuals, and the promise of a fascinating mystery are all there, there is a frustrating hollowness at the centre. Harker is hardly a character worth investing in. Although Maika Monroe’s beautifully subtle performance is something to admire, the character gets to more than skin deep. And so much of the rest of the film remains shallow as well. The film’s emotional material remains dry and lifeless and the hunt for the killer is underwhelming. It’s an excellent looking, and often very frightening, film, but Longlegs doesn’t present much else to latch onto.
Taking place in Clinton-era Oregon, Harker’s investigation into Longlegs takes her on a decades-long dig into the past. The case is covered in satanic symbols and strange characters, marked by terrifying crime scene photographs, and stories of ordinary families turning against each other. And then it starts to click: Harker deciphers the code, puts together disparate clues, and begins to piece together the identity and origin of Longlegs. It all happens in such rapid succession and is presented so lifelessly that the audience is unable to take part in the deciphering of the mystery. But still the plot moves and we eventually come face-to-face with Nicolas Cage’ haunting serial killer whose appearance has been built up extensively, both in the film’s marketing material and in the film itself. But Cage’s performance can’t quite live up to the hype. Seemingly content to recycle cliches of horror movie villains with some questionable make-up design, Longlegs is a rather silly antagonist. He’s a far cry from the antagonists of the films that play a profound influence on the film.
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| Osgood Perkins (right) on the set of Longlegs. Photo via Neon. |
Writer-director Osgood “Oz” Perkins channels a plethora of influences from other moody crime horror-thrillers here, like Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, HBO’s True Detective television series, David Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac, and even Matt Reeves’ The Batman. Yet, Perkins seems to take all the wrong lessons from these other films. He nails the ambiance, yes, but there’s nothing beneath it. Perkins can’t decide what he wants to be: will it be a gritty, scary crime thriller? will it be a supernatural horror film? To this, Perkins shouts “yes!,” leaving Longlegs without a true sense of identity. An exciting premise at first, but the blending of the supernatural and the real-world investigation comes off as so poorly conceived and poorly concluded. A hodge-podge of influence only makes the viewer want to watch better films. When the film does reach its conclusion, the payoff to all the mystery feels like a rather boilerplate narrative. The surprises never truly surprise, nor does the film build to an ending worth the electrifying ambiance and the surprising directions the narrative veers into throughout the film.
Despite its impeccable atmosphere and a subtle performance from Monroe, Longlegs never feels like it truly comes into its own as a film. It’s a sad thing to witness. Perkins’ film has been paraded as one of the year’s scariest, most effective horror movies, but the finished product is rather anticlimactic. It has its moments of fright, sure, but the film fails to build anything beyond its visuals. The excellence of the technical work can, further, not be overstated. The imagery is wonderful, the colouring is haunting, and the editing is tight and sharp. But Perkins is in desperate need of a better script, one that can encapsulate the foreboding atmosphere of moody detective fiction while also equipping the story with a compelling protagonist and a mystery worth sinking your teeth into.
Longlegs is now playing in theatres.
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