DAN WEBSTER:
If you think about it, horror movies are more memorable for individual scenes than for the overall feeling they strive to create.
Think of a hand emerging from a grave in Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Of a boy confronting the ghosts of twin girls in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Of the moment that Donald Sutherland’s character, at his own peril, solves the mystery in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.
Writer-director Oz Perkins works hard to imbue his feature horror film Longlegs with such scenes. And at least over the film’s first half, he largely succeeds. Trouble is, he then is forced to give us a second half to sit through.
Longlegs is a serial-killer story. It’s the 1990s and some psycho seems to be murdering whole families, or at least is somehow forcing the fathers of such families to murder the others before committing suicide. All the crimes revolve around the 14th [of the month] birthday of each family’s 9-year-old daughter. And all the crime scenes are marked with notes that include strange letters and carry the signature of someone named "Longlegs."
Maika Monroe stars as Lee Harker, a neophyte FBI special agent who has a particular talent: she can sense a killer’s presence, a skill that nevertheless fails to save one of her unfortunate partners. Still, her suspected powers of clairvoyance are thought to be valuable to the Longlegs investigation, which—overseen by FBI agents Carter (played by Blair Underwood) and Browning (played by Michelle Choi-Lee)—have gone nowhere.
Harker throws herself into the case, which brings up an uncomfortable sense of her own past. And as the film’s opening sequence indicates, that past may have something to do with the person who is Longlegs himself. The key to the mystery may also involve Harker’s mother Ruth (played by Alicia Witt).
Over that first half of the film that I referred to, much of what goes on carries the necessary aura of creep that any effective horror study must have. That’s to the credit both of writer-director Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi. Scenes unfold gradually, at times glacially, and Arochi’s muted lighting provides a specific kind of threatening feel (though supposedly set in Oregon, Longlegs was shot in Vancouver, British Columbia).
Part of what Perkins does so effectively, too, over that first half of his film is to keep the Longlegs character (played by none other than Nicolas Cage) mostly obscured—seen as a distant silhouette in a family-type station wagon or, in closeup, only from the lower half of his face down. So we are left to digest only the character’s strange clothing and a voice that, even while uttering seemingly friendly entreaties, comes across as nightmarishly shrill.
Then, though, everything becomes too obvious. Cage emerges as the Longlegs character, who is so strange that anyone of that description in real life would be immediately consigned to a mental institution. Horror films require suspension of disbelief, of course, so any departure from reality is natural.
But Cage is always a special case. His best performances, whether in Con Air or Leaving Las Vegas, have come in roles that call for at least a bit of restraint. His worst roles, from Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man remake to Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, are films in which he goes completely over the top.
Which is what happens in Longlegs, and is the point at which any sense of subtlety that Perkins was going for, in theme or tone, dissipates into the ether of films that rank as little more than guilty pleasures. Monroe isn’t able to help much, as her Harker—afflicted by her past—is required to sleepwalk through everything. Underwood manages to add some sense of vitality even as his character, too, ends up feeling the brunt of the Longlegs legacy.
If you can figure out the specifics of that legacy, if it makes sense and if it gives you the chills that all good horror flicks need, congratulations. As for me, I’m looking forward to what I suspect could be a better film, also starring Monroe. They Follow, a sequel to 2014’s It Follows, is set for a 2025 release.
The threat in It Follows is an unseen force with many faces. And moments involving that kind of menace are far scarier than an overacting Nicolas Cage.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.