NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Longlegs gets its name from a creepy character with pale, almost translucent skin and a chirpy, childlike voice. In early scenes of the film, he’s uncanny and unsettling, shot from odd angles so that we never quite get a good look at him; he’s either far away, peering out from behind something, or in off-kilter close-ups with most of his face out of frame.
But as the movie goes on and Longlegs himself becomes more involved in the plot, we see more and more of him, until he’s no longer menacing and is merely a curiosity for us to gawk at. Perhaps that was the intention, but it’s also indicative of the whole movie, which loses its mystique as it begins to explain its own mechanics.
It’s set in rural Oregon in the mid-1990s, which means it’s always gloomy and rainy and the characters take lots of long drives down roads that go winding through dense woods. Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is an FBI agent fresh from the academy, and she seems to have a sixth sense about the details of difficult cases. We’re introduced to her as she finds a suspect in a nondescript, cookie-cutter suburban duplex with seemingly no evidence beyond a mere hunch.
Monroe, an indie horror stalwart from films like It Follows and Watcher, plays Harker with the deadpan style of a Cronenberg protagonist. It’s as if she’s been hypnotized. We don’t know much about her, but in phone calls to her devout and similarly deadpan mother (Alicia Witt), we get hints that she was once religious.
Alongside her superior officer (Blair Underwood), Harker is investigating a series of murder-suicides that stretch back a couple decades. In each instance, a seemingly normal, seemingly God-fearing father butchered his family. It seems open and shut until the authorities receive mocking letters, filled with Zodiac-style symbols, from a person calling themselves Longlegs and taking credit for the crimes.
This is all pretty standard stuff, and it’s impossible not to think of The Silence of the Lambs—not least because they’ve styled Monroe similarly to Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling—as well as the police procedurals of David Fincher. But then there’s Nicolas Cage, who plays Longlegs and who I’ve deliberately left unmentioned until now. Buried under prosthetics, he’s giving one of those full bore, tic-heavy performances he’s known for. It’s amusing to watch him go for it, but it’s also distracting in a way that breaks the spell of the film. He isn’t scary, he’s merely preposterous.
Longlegs was written and directed by Osgood Perkins, who has made equally atmospheric films like The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Gretel & Hansel. Cinematographer Andres Arochi, making an impressive feature debut, shoots the film in moody shadow, and he’s always putting negative space behind the characters so that our eyes are constantly darting around, looking for something—or someone—that’s not supposed to be there. There’s a lot of style and craft here, but at a certain point, that’s all I could see.
Longlegs has been an unexpected box office hit, and credit is due to the viral marketing campaign and early reactions that have breathlessly proclaimed this a new watershed in horror. The advertising is great, but it really only applies to half of the movie. It loses steam as it goes, a film that begins in the intriguingly ethereal but ends in the slightly goofy literal.
For Spokane Public Radio I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.