Osgood Perkins, “Longlegs” (2024)
As horror films drawing on past classics like “Silence of the Lambs” go, Osgood Perkins’s “Longlegs” would seem to have a lot going for it: it’s more psychological horror drama than it is supernatural or occult, despite the marketing hype that preceded it. A new FBI agent with a past history of psychological trauma appears to have the gift of second sight so she’s immediately put on a historical case that the FBI hasn’t been able to solve: a long series of family killings going back about 30 years, in which the one common denominator is that the daughter in each family is about to turn 9 or 10 years of age on the 14th of the month. In each killing, the father commits mass murder yet there are clues at each scene of the killing that the murder has been masterminded by an outsider called “Longlegs”. Working on the case, sifting through clues and interviewing various people including a patient at a mental asylum, the FBI recruit, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), discovers a disturbing personal link to Longlegs (Nicholas Cage) himself. Visiting her mother (Alicia Witt) who still lives in the house where Lee grew up, the agent obtains an old photograph she herself took of Longlegs as a child soon to reach the age of nine years. This leads to the FBI arresting and incarcerating Longlegs – but the question of who is Longlegs’s accomplice in setting up the murders, and how this accomplice does so, remains to be resolved.
The film is beautifully made, with cinematography ranging from grey and drab stormy rural scenes, and rows of mass-produced suburban houses all painted the same bland white colour, to lurid red interiors where Longlegs crafts his dolls that carry (within their heads) metallic balls that, when struck, emit noisy hypnotic signals to those who hear them. Set in the early 1990s, the film’s plot is constrained by the forensic technologies at hand to the FBI at the time. It must be said that whatever FBI procedure existed in dealing with serial murderers in the 1990s, it sure is not followed in the film itself, or for that matter in its “Silence of the Lambs” inspiration: rookie agents would never be allowed to pursue or interview serial murderers on their own, and certainly a sensitive agent with a childhood past of trauma and a personal link to the killer would have been taken off that case. Lee Harker herself, acting as if she sleep-walks 24 hours a day every day, would probably have been given a desk job rather than allowed to go on the beat. Plot inaccuracies aside, the film is very visually striking, its sparse and minimal style, and slow, level pace forcing audiences to scrutinise every detail in houses where scenes of horror and mayhem occur, to find clues and warning signs that murder and violence are about to erupt.
The acting more or less fits the demands of the plot and the characters, with Maika Monroe’s blankness as Lee Harker complementing Cage’s more hysterically theatrical and hokey Manson-like Longlegs. As is usual with Cage, he throws himself completely into his character and ends up stealing every scene he is in – this however has the unfortunate effect of showing up how thin the plot and its other characters are. The other cast members acquit themselves well enough, but audiences will not feel much sympathy for their one-dimensional characters.
The plot probably would have been much improved if the ending had been different so that the hypnotic hold that Longlegs has over all his victims – including Lee Harker herself, her supervising agent Carter (Blair Underwood) and his family – is cut off, and the supposed Satanic connection is demonstrated to exist only in people’s minds. Longlegs’s grand scheme linking all his crimes into a ritual would never come to fruition and would be revealed as a bizarre plan borne of mental illness. (Of course, there would be the possibility of a sequel in which a copycat killer attempts to complete the scheme.) The hold that trauma, especially childhood and family trauma, can have on people’s minds long after they have become adults, and how this can be reinforced by belief in the occult, Satan or some other malign religious influence, is made apparent in the film’s final bloody moments. Even with the ending as it is, the effects of trauma still turn out to be long-lasting: Lee Harker may have physically freed herself from Longlegs’s insidious hold but mentally she remains under his spell.