‘Longlegs’ Review: Happy Birthday
Maika Monroe in Longlegs. Courtesy of NEON.
If you take a look at distributor NEON’s extraordinary marketing campaign for Longlegs, a serial killer thriller from filmmaker Osgood Perkins, you’ll be struck with quotes like, “The scariest film of the decade.” While this marketing approach has thus far brought in NEON’s biggest Thursday box office to date, it deeply mischaracterizes the film — for Longlegs, a serial drama similar to the likes of Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs, sits shrouded in dread, slowly crawling into your psyche, rather than attacking you with flashy gore and the trademark jumpscares that have come to define modern horror.
For over a decade now, they’ve all happened the same way. Dozens of deaths in the suburbs of Oregon. A father snaps, turning what should be a happy day into a murder-suicide. The kicker, directly linking all the murders — each deceased family had a daughter born on the fourteenth of any given month. And at the scene of each crime, a card, written in cipher, signed, Longlegs.
The serial bravura displayed by our titular killer (Nicolas Cage, covered in ghostly-white prosthesis) is akin to that of the Zodiac, the first of many nods to the killers of cinema’s past, each from masterful thrillers which clearly gave inspiration to Longlegs, a film what wants to be mentioned in the same breath as those Fincher and Demme classics.
Longlegs. Courtesy of NEON.
Throughout its first act, denoted by a blood-red title card, Longlegs plays out as more of a procedural drama. The serial comparisons feel skewed, as, spare for whatever our minds expect to follow in any given scene, little horror is to emerge outside of the atmospherical tension and dread, once the plot gets rolling. Director Perkins places our protagonist, FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) in everyday settings, cast in extreme wide angles to let the audience search each corner of the frame for something out of place — but Perkins is a smart enough filmmaker to forgive any “traditional” scares in favor of building tension for a more drawn-out payoff.
For the next hour or so, it’s standard serial fanfare. Pull apart beats from Se7en, Zodiac, and Silence of the Lambs, and you’ll find Longlegs, down to the minute. The major highlight comes in the opening minutes — a prologue of sorts — as we’re introduced to Cage’s killer character in a sequence that plays out as a fucked-up home movie of sorts, playing with perspective and expectations to leave the audience with the one of the best — and only — real scares Longlegs has to offer.
An early sequence sets up a psychic-esque aspect of Monroe’s character, something made out to be important that’s almost immediately forgotten as she’s assigned to Longlegs’ case. Perkins writes Agent Harker as a detective lost in her own ambition, employing significantly more presumed agency in the tracking of her prey than she’s given, as the roles are shifted and Harker becomes something of prey herself, not unlike David Mills’ relationship to John Doe.
Maika Monroe in Longlegs. Courtesy of NEON.
It’s always interesting to find out what motivates a serial killer in a film. In Se7en, John Doe wants to make something of himself, and reshape a society he’s unhappy with. “I'm setting the example, and it's going to be puzzled over and studied and followed, from now on.” In Silence of the Lambs, Buffalo Bill kills out of self-determined personal necessity, using victims’ bodies to create a skin suit after failing to qualify for gender reassignment surgery. In Longlegs, the answer is something more… Satanic.
It’s this third-act turn that takes Longlegs off its carefully charted course into more dangerous waters, only hurt by an exposition dump of a monologue that reads more like Jake Peralta explaining how he won the Halloween Heist than the terror-inducing reveal it’s meant to be.
The environmental work Perkins puts into the film is undoubtedly praise-worthy, however. He not only crafts an offputting, demented killer but also a detailed backstory and messy maze of information to accompany it. It’s just unfortunate that it’s undone so quickly by an ending that feels like exactly what the Longlegs murders seem to be, a bad birthday present from someone creepily excited to give it to you.
