After a brief opening sequence set in the 1970s, which the film will later return to, most of Osgood Perkins’s newly released “Longlegs” takes place in a grim and austere version of Oregon in the 1990s. A series of brutal murder-suicides have been occurring across the state for the last 30 years, and when an inexplicable gift of clairvoyance is revealed while on the hunt for a serial killer with a colleague, newly recruited FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is tapped for the cold case. It’s a set-up that presents Perkins’s horror film as part of a mode of investigative thrillers, as it works to unsettle, and even strike fear in its audience.
In that brief opening scene, a young girl is approached by a man whose face is obscured for much of the scene, but whose malevolent voice does enough to strike unease. Although we can’t quite see him, and the glimpses of makeup on his face might not help to place him, we know it is Nicolas Cage. The film’s opening credits feature “Nicolas Cage as Longlegs” stirring our anticipation. Just as he leans into her, to give us a clearer sense of what he looks like, the scene ends. It’s a skill for building anticipation that’s probably Perkins’ most effective attribute in “Longlegs”. Perkins is good at inciting expectation. A languorous pause somewhere we might expect swiftness. A sudden cutaway somewhere else we might expect a sustained tension. A promise of something that makes you hold your breath waiting for something. But by halfway into “Longlegs”, there is a suggestion that you might be holding your breath for something that cannot materialise. And by the end of it, you realise that you’re suffocating on nothingness.
From its opening scenes in the “present” of its nineties-era police procedural, “Longlegs” immediately gives me pause in its approach to the detective arc it maps out for Lee. She’s joined by the affable, if careless, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) a superior in the FBI who is happy to cede to Lee’s half-psychic skills. When Lee shows doubt about her skills, he quips that it’s better to be half-psychic than not. He’s right. But if Lee is only half-psychic, “Longlegs” is immediately on uneven ground by having very little ability to establish her competency at her job being the clairvoyant. The horror-thriller as detective has existed for a long time in film, and other forms of art, but “Longlegs” is already on fragile ground in its first act when it finds itself unable to establish what makes Lee good at her job beyond the visions, which the film has no handle on presenting in a way that offers any visual intrigue.
In a structure reminiscent of Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs” (arguably the most successful detective horror/thriller of the nineties) we spend most of our time in “Longlegs” with Lee. It is not the advantage of Monroe. Perkins has written Monroe into a wall, giving Lee Harker little to establish her as a person with much resemblance to a human figure. Monroe plays her fidgety and tense and unusual, but it’s a series of overt odd behaviours that do not contribute to a meaningful idea of who she is as a person. In a taut mid-film sequence, a malevolent figure seems to be outside of her house, and Lee is featured performing a series of escalating bad decisions. A detective with no skills of careful detection. Monroe isn’t given enough to establish Lee as a compelling presence, and she’s not skilled enough to spin gold from straw. The first half of the film can’t quite thread the line of what it is that makes her a sharp figure on her own, absent of the inevitable relationship with the central mystery we know is coming. And when “Longlegs” begins to reveal exactly what it is up to, things go from bad to worse.
The actual mystery of the murder-suicides is a clever set-up. Fathers across the state kill their wives and children. The acts are seemingly unrelated, except each family has a daughter with a pattern revealed in their birthdays and each crime scene features a note signed by someone called Longlegs. Perkins is telegraphing, emphatically, that there is something that ties Lee to it and when the reveal comes it is not quite unexpected. The unexpectedness isn’t the issue, though. When “Longlegs” begins to spin itself into a frenzy to reveal its inner workings to us, it doesn’t unravel so much as it begins to deflate little by little and then by a whole lot.
Things take a turn for the occult, explaining the Oregon locale and putting “Longlegs” in conversation with presentations of religion mixed with the occult that unsettle the placidity of suburbia. The ideas that Perkins have are compelling when considered as just that – ideas. The relationship between humans and belief systems and their susceptibility to the supernatural and the devotion one might have for something beyond human, would all be sharp and compelling if Perkins had any interest, or ability, in presenting humanity in all its nuanced fallibility. Even as “Longlegs” invokes ideas of Christian fanaticism or satanic obsession, it can offer no meaningful engagement with any of them because it does not know how to present the human devotion that is essential for belief to turn terrifying. Instead, “Longlegs” is committed to an incredibly thin imagining of both Christianity and Satanism, and its most emphatic limitation is that it cannot thread any kind of sharp line of devotion from the characters, especially those for whom devotion seems to be essential.
And how could it? Perkins cannot convince us that the devotion any of these characters might have could sincere when it struggles to create a single character who feels as if they’re living and breathing and vivid and real. The visual stylisations bleed into every part of the film so much that the beyond Blair Underwood (wasted despite a congenial performance) these people do not resemble human figures. Alicia Witt, who appears first as a voice and then later in body, as Lee’s mother is trying tirelessly to carve some semblance of meaning, but “Longlegs” has no true window into what it means to be devoted to something beyond self that cannot be seen or proven. Perkins’s vision of this Oregon world is a miserable and grey world where all is bathed in evil. That might sound good on paper, but when there is no possibility of goodness for characters to cleave to any sense of dramatic tension to be found, horror as tragedy is lost.
“Longlegs” keeps on orbiting the central fascination with the unreal but does not have an entry point into its titular character, or their accomplice, to do anything with that devotion. This does not feel like a thoughtful provocation, but merely a film being led to its plot-points with lethargic momentum. I’m not especially compelled by any specific images here but the whole of Andrés Arochi’s cinematography is trying as much as any effect to prop up the nothingness that is the screenplay. In its best moments, it achieves an uncomfortable mix of the stultifying and picaresque, which is the clearest symbology that aligns it with the function of those children’s toys that emerge as key later on in the mystery. But it’s hard for the cinematography to be consistently impressive, when it’s buoyed by a screenplay that gives little and by blocking that does nothing with the aspect ratio. The more it goes on, the more the austere and rigid shots feel like they’re losing effect – whether plot, or performers, the things within the frame seem to be conveying nothing at all. That is the tale of “Longlegs”. A well framed picture that is completely void of anything.
“Longlegs” is playing in cinemas
