Longlegs | 2024
Maika Monroe in Longlegs. Courtesy of NEON.
If movies were defined solely by their marketing campaigns, then Osgood Perkins' Longlegs would easily be one of the best of the year. Movies are quite a bit more than their marketing campaigns, however, and my feelings on Longlegs are much more muted.
Perkins, son of the late Anthony Perkins, has made a career crafting unsettling, slow-burn horror films like The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) and Gretel & Hansel (2020). His latest film, Longlegs, is part police procedural, part Satanic panic horror film, as an intrepid young FBI agent (Maika Monroe) uses her supposedly psychic abilities to help track down a serial killer known only as Longlegs (Nicholas Cage), who has been killing families in mysteriously gruesome ways for more than three decades. As Agent Harker gets ever closer to Longlegs, disturbing details about her past begin to emerge, and her real connection to the killer threatens to destroy everything she thought she knew about herself.
Much of the buzz surrounding Longlegs centers on Cage's unhinged performance, and he is indeed a sight to behold, a singular creation that ranks among one of the actor's most indelible characters. Unrecognizable beneath prosthetics and pasty white makeup, he almost resembles an evil Celia Weston after some botched plastic surgery more than the Cage we all know and love. Monroe is likewise strong, and Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt both have strong supporting turns.
Yet for all the film's uneasy sense of dread, something feels persistently hollow about Longlegs. Perkins' direction is certainly stylish, maintaining an almost unbearable atmosphere of impending doom. On the other hand, its exploration of repressed memories and uncovering childhood trauma feels somewhat toothless amid the rather disappointing supernatural elements of the film. The idea that parents can often perpetuate the cycle of trauma by protecting abusers is deeply disturbing enough, especially when combined with the unnerving serial killer story. The problem here is that the supernatural elements rob these ideas of some of their power.
The Satanic panic of the 1980s is a fascinating case of mass hysteria, so to use it here as a milieu in which to examine cycles of abuse feels somewhat cheap. In the face of such real human evil, pinning it on "Satan" feels like a cop-out. That isn't to say that there aren't some interesting elements here - Perkins is clearly a skilled craftsman with a keen sense of mood, but Longlegs needed more than just Cage's unique spark of madness to really land.
