Lamb Lite
Son of psycho Osgood Perkins unleashes his best slow burning chiller yet. Plus Nicolas Cage.
Longlegs
Director: Osgood Perkins • Writer: Osgood Perkins
Starring: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, Kiernan Shipka
USA • 1hr 41mins
Opens Hong Kong Aug 29 • IIB
Grade: B
From the minute it begins, Osgood “Oz” Perkins’s Longlegs operates in an atmosphere of persistent unease. The word on the street over the summer has been that this is 2024’s scariest film. It isn’t, but it is, hands down, the most disquieting by a long shot. The story begins in a foundational home movie-esque 1:33 aspect ratio and follows FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, It Follows) on her very low key hunt for a glam rock-obsessed serial killer called Longlegs. Perkins lays it on thick: Longlegs trades in the language of dark corners, stillness and silence, negative space (a break in at Harker’s home is truly white-knuckle) and what you don’t see, and for the most part it works. There’s no denying The Silence of the Lambs DNA (and Perkins has always admitted his influences) that’s baked into Longlegs, and in many ways it’s a better film (sorry Lambs heads). Perkins is horror royalty for having cranked out a handful of under-the-radar chillers (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Gretel & Hansel) but mostly for being the scion of Anthony Perkins – better known as Norman Bates or the psycho from Psycho. Longlegs is his most complete film, even with its third act wobbles.
Things go poorly
The action starts in 1974, when a nine-year-old girl has a snowy run-in with a mysterious, creepy dude in thick make-up. It’s as tense and ominous an encounter as you’ll ever see. Smash cut to roughly 20 years later where we meet Harker as her boss William Carter (Blair Underwood) assigns her to work on a series of cases involving men who seemingly goes bananas and kill their families. The only real clues the Bureau has to work with are a coded message left at each crime scene that, for some reason, Harker can decipher, and a common birthday for many of the child victims. Eventually she finds herself in pursuit of Dale Cobble, or Longlegs (Nicolas Cage).
As she plugs away on the murders, Harker blows in a few phone calls to her semi-estranged, ultra-religious mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), which help Harker work the case as well as jog some buried trauma from her memory. The less you know the better Longlegs works – narratively and stylistically. Perkins finds a way to exploit the way he frames his images (with help from DOP Andrés Arochi), boosts his grain and wraps his characters in period detail to keep us on the back foot and questioning what we’re seeing and hearing.
As much as Longlegs has in common with Lambs, it can be argued the film is cut from the same cloth as the recent clutch of so-called elevated horror films by the likes of Ari Aster, Robert Eggers and Natalie Erika James (Hereditary, The Witch, Relic). But also like those films, great as they are (or perhaps loaded with great moments) Longlegs needs to pick a bloody lane; root the story in either the psychological or the supernatural and go. Both are fine, but laying a heap of mystical nonsense on the plot without any grounding is distracting at best, derailing at worst. At the very least, get your pieces on the game board early, particularly when you cram so many genres and devices – detective thriller, crime procedural, devil worship, rotten church workers, and possession among others.
But what, you’re probably asking, is Cage up to? How heavily is he Cage-ing it up? Pretty hard, though in fairness to Monroe’s emotionally bottlenecked agent and Underwood at peak bureaucratic gruffness, Cage’s signature brand of gonzo is more of a side than a main dish this time around; ultimately it’s Harker’s story. He’s predictably mesmerising in his lunacy and he makes Perkins look good, though the director knows just how much Cage nuttiness to sprinkle. There’s not a lot in Longlegs to chew on; there are too many ingredients to make a thematic whole yet somehow not enough to do the same, but as a pure entertainment it’s solid. Talk about psycho. — DEK