With the right atmosphere, and the right performances, some films are lucky enough to immerse you, to have you neck high in a sensation as its cinematography laps against your suspension of disbelief. Oz Perkins’ latest venture, Longlegs, forgoes the slow sinking feeling after its first thirty minutes and prefers to drop you directly into an ocean of dread. It drags you under tides of hopelessness that don’t stop smashing against your body until the final frames of its last reel.
Set sometime around the 90s, a serial killer is ripping through rural Midwestern America. His modus operandi is a paradox, and his crimes are a series of inhuman massacres that leave no survivors and no clues. The only hint as to who the killer is is a score of cipher-riddled letters, and the name they’re signed with: Longlegs.
While Longlegs is very clearly evoking genre titans like Silence of the Lambs and Rosemary’s Baby (heavy on the Demme), the film’s cinematography is nothing like its inspirations. Something about the way the entire film is framed and lit has this kind of aura of shadow pricking at the corner of your eyes for the entire runtime. Even in well-lit environments like FBI building interiors with their sickly flourescents, and wide-open bright exteriors blanketed in pure snow, it’s the visual equivalent of feeling fingers ever so close to your skin but never making that contact.
Those environments and the sets that make them up are designed and decorated to be suffocating; there isn’t a single inch of the world Perkins and company has built that feels clean or safe, reflecting the ever-present danger of Longlegs and the places that he leaves possessed by his actions. It’s of course underpinned by an understated score that creeps into your ears and doesn’t hammer in anything that the film isn’t already making you confront head-on.
This is all in service of a soul-sapping performance by Maika Monroe, carrying a haunting air around her as FBI special agent Lee Harker. She plays the character, a stony and disquieted rookie, with this trembling intensity that worsens as the case falls into madness. There’s liquid torture coursing through her veins particularly hard in the final act, with this stage presence that feels like fishhooks getting into you as you feel her unease vicariously. Monroe has always been a horror movie darling, loved by fans for her work first in It Follows and later The Guest, though the hordes of general audiences flocking to theatres this weekend and next are about to discover the new “it girl” of mainstream horror.
Nicholas Cage is also, as expected, quite good as the titular killer, though any comments on how he achieves this betray my desire to send you in almost completely blind. He makes for a bizarre and skin-crawling antagonist, despite the performance sometimes veering too hard into the territory that Ted Levine’s work as Buffalo Bill already charted (more simply put, Cage emulates the best of Levine, and its close, but no cigar when you look back on the template he’s working off of). The cherry on top is a short performance bordering on a cameo by Kiernan Shipka, who worked with Perkins previously on the impeccable 2015 feature The Blackcoat’s Daughter. Surprisingly, her appearance is one of the film’s best moments, so I can’t say anything else about it at risk of spoiling it.
A scene early on in the film where Harker is lured out of her home by a silhouette in the woods is the perfect metaphor for this film’s story: the plot is a mystery that feels much more like a slow walk into gnawing outer darkness, rather than a twist-filled whodunit you have to unpack. It doesn’t have you laboring over its mystery, it’s not overly clever with its network of hints and clues of which there are very few. And its final third rather plainly smacks anybody who doesn’t understand what’s going on in the face with all the answers they could want. I would say it was jarring, and very well it might be on rewatch, but the monologue that does it (along with the voice that’s carrying it to your ears) is so perfectly paired with the film soundtrack and visuals that I didn’t really notice, and frankly I still don’t really care.
Note that the final act of Longlegs will play out exactly how you expect it to if you’re paying close attention. But this isn’t to deride it or call it predictable; this is to let you know you’ll become horribly aware of what is going on just as our main character is only starting to get it, striking you with a very nasty dose of dramatic irony that acts fast. By the time the clock is run down, there’s no relief or comfort to be found. Longlegs is dyed-in-the-wool in its refusal to let you feel anything other than restless uncertainty. It’s a tour de force, and the end of its path is nothing but a study of esoteric evil, and cold discomfort hoping to kill all warmth that might help you escape it; a study that you’d do well to see for yourself.
