A young FBI agent investigates a serial killer who cackles, dresses creepily and likes to leave cryptic clues at the scene of the crime. Longlegs is another belt of 1990s horror for those who can’t get enough Seven, It or The Silence of the Lambs. It’s derivative and yet it’s also its own beast, involving, excellently crafted and stonkingly acted. And Nicolas Cage is in it – as mad as a bat and every second he’s on the screen wildly entertaining, and freaky.
Director Osgood Perkins’s decision to shoot it all like an Edward Hopper painting – still, flat, empty, so many brown hues – is the masterstroke, and Maika Monroe plays along with a performance as FBI Special Agent Lee Harker that’s saucer-eyed, quiet, watchful. In the film’s grisly opening moments we learn that Harker is meant to be slightly psychic and Monroe craftily suggests that the agent is spooked by her own gifts, as you might be when you can intuit evil coming your way.
But back to Cage, who is the spice in this otherwise controlled exercise in restraint, a character in white face with a liking for the band T Rex. He might be an emissary of Satan, or Satan himself, or just some mad guy with a grudge and an exceptional ability to insinuate himself into the houses of normal families, where he somehow persuades one of them to do his killing for him – we get snatches of one father laying into wife and daughter with an axe.
Of course Longlegs, as he signs his notes, inhabits a dank basement and of course the walls are covered in pictures (including a Marc Bolan poster) and cuttings and whatnot. And of course Agent Harker has a boss (Blair Underwood, very good) who’s her superior but in all dramatic respects is the sidekick. And of course at some point there will be a trip to an asylum to interview someone who has met Longlegs and lived to tell the tale.
Other pages from the 1990s manual on horror movies will be turned, but Perkins, who wrote as well as directs, adds subtle shading as he leafs through. That basement, for instance. By the end you will say, “Oh yes, of course it was obvious…” or will you? I didn’t.
What atmosphere this film has, what mood, how beautifully lit it is and what a sympathetic score of hovering, whirring, whistling sounds. How beautifully the silk shirt Monroe wears throughout hangs off her shoulders. How great is star-on-the-rise Kiernan Shipka’s performance as the madwoman in the asylum. How creepy is Alicia Witt’s as Harker’s strange mother. This is a movie where all the small details and minor characters are just right.
Cage has not, so he says, played a serial killer before and says he will have the phone ringing off the hook now he’s played one here, but was clearly tempted because it allows him to howl at the moon, sing, shake his body around in weird ways, wear more bad hair and generally act the fruit loop. Another consideration might have been that he’s not actually in it very much. Perhaps a couple of days’ shooting and he was done.
At the heart of the film a trolley-problem equation – how much evil can you introduce into the world with the intention of doing good? And I’ll not say any more than that because that would let the cat out of the bag.
Osgood Perkins started out as an actor. As long ago as 1983 he was playing young Norman Bates in Psycho II (alongside Anthony Perkins as older Norman). And over the following decades a string of tiny roles in the likes of Six Degrees of Separation, Wolf, Legally Blonde, Star Trek and Nope. Longlegs changes all that.
Longlegs – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
