Care has been taken to avoid spoilers in this review but please proceed with caution if you have not seen the film.
An innovative and aggressive marketing campaign may have prepared audiences for Longlegs’ nightmarish visual elements and unsettling tone but it certainly didn’t signal the film’s complex and deeply intimate take on motherhood and familial sacrifice. What has felt like an almost-interminable promotional lead up, during which Osgood Perkins’ latest offering has been touted as ‘the scariest horror film of all time’ and this decade’s answer to The Silence of the Lambs, has threatened to eclipse the crime thriller underneath it all. However, Perkins’ mastery of framing and sound design is just good enough to drown out the ‘overhyped’ accusations.
Longlegs follows Maika Monroe’s Lee Harker, a stoic yet self-assured FBI agent, as she puts her uncanny intuition to good use on the investigation into the Longlegs killer – a shadowy figure who is mysteriously connected to a string of family murder-suicides and who communicates in code. Both leads here – Monroe and Nicolas Cage, in the eponymous role – are certified scream queens. Monroe is familiar to horror fans for her work in It Follows and Watcher, while Cage has been tackling more genre fare of late, appearing in Mandy, Color Out of Space and Mom and Dad.
Monroe’s Harker is quietly compelling in a way that is reminiscent of Daniel Kaluuya’s portrayal of OJ in Nope. This is a woman for whom everything is serious and her hushed reverence echoes the quiet brutality of the crime scene imagery which is sparingly invoked throughout the film. Her restrained temperament, suggesting some sort of external stifling force, hints at a distant past which may have contained some of the ‘nasty stuff’ her mother frets about her having to deal with in her job. Commiserating over a late-night phone call, her mother (Alicia Witt of Urban Legend fame) reminds Harker that she too has had a history dealing with nasty stuff, due to her past occupation as a nurse. This implication of the feminine inheritance of the burden of dirty work is a major theme throughout the film and, along with the subliminal/barely there imagery and the destabilising aspect ratio transitions, is a large part of why this film works.
There is much made of the nuclear family in this 1993-set thriller, and the central inciting incident in the lives of the victim-families is the birthday of the pre-pubescent daughter. This is when the murders take place and, more importantly, it is when the fathers no longer recognise their own daughters as pure or deserving of life. As Harker’s investigation develops, we begin to see maternal sacrifice as a potent tool for evil and selfishness. The protection of the ‘little things’ for whom life is so cruel seems to be just another feminine duty and can be just as dirty as its masculine counterpart. This is as nuanced a take on motherhood and birth (repeated references to the pain and bloodshed of childbirth remind us of the duality of the experience) as I’ve seen in a horror film. Perkins, whose father Anthony Perkins was the star of classic Hitchcock film Psycho and was famously closeted his entire life, has spoken about the autobiographical nature of Longlegs, in so far as it teases out the ugliest possible ramifications of a parent’s decision to tell a white lie (in his case, his mother’s, who chose to keep their father’s sexual identity and fatal HIV diagnosis from her children).
Neon’s decision to keep Cage’s Longlegs character design hidden throughout the promotional period was a smart one. Over the film’s runtime, we get glimpses of his satan-worshipping, long-haired villain but his face remains largely obscured until the third act. In a world which is muted in both colour and sound, Cage’s Longlegs rips through the screen. Where we’ve mostly been contained to dark hallways and the inside of drab offices, Longlegs speeds through town screeching ‘Mommy, daddy, unmake me and save from the hell of living!’ His outsized portrayal is somehow refreshing amongst the backdrop of suffocating stillness and rigid professionalism. It is that frightening allure that so typifies what is provocative about a suburban satanic panic story, and what feels sexy about the things that mean to harm us.
While the Silence of the Lambs comparisons feel off-the-mark (somewhere between Grey Gardens and The Shining feels like a better, if almost incomprehensible, description) Longlegs is a bold and technically accomplished horror film with a lot more to say than the vast majority of the A24 social horror fare with which it will no doubt be lumped on many a Letterboxd list. For that we can be grateful that Perkins’ famous father passed down to him the burden of doing the ‘nasty stuff’ – creating classic horror films.