My notes on Longlegs
Oz Perkins makes distinctively low-key horror films – the kind which give you a general feeling of unease, as if your mood was affected by a sub-audial thrumm, rather than a series of sharp shocks. Following The Blackcoat’s Daughter (aka February), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Gretel & Hansel, Longlegs is less claustrophobic … but only because its sense of all-pervasive evil seeps across decades and multiple households visited by unimaginable violence and terror rather than confine itself to a single haunted place.
A picture of Bill Clinton on an office wall (later, a crime scene in the past has Nixon) and clunky mobile phones signal that the period is the 1990s, and Perkins’ premise deliberately echoes a run of 1990s fictions (The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, Millennium, even The X-Files) which deal with malign genius serial killers of almost supernatural malevolence and the psychic cost of tracking them down to end reigns of terror. Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) – does the name evoke Dracula, recently played by the character’s nemesis Nicolas Cage? – is a neurodivergent analogue to Clarice Starling, a rookie FBI agent whose intuition registers as psychic. Out door-knocking in a bland neighbourhood, doing the gruntwork nobody wants to do any more, she instantly pegs the ‘cookie-cutter’ address where a killer lives, though this immediately leads to the death of her less perspicaceous partner and a series of baffling tests which get her a sort-of promotion. Harker is taken under the wing of veteran Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), introduced as a family man in a tipoff that his wife and kid will eventually be threatened, and assigned to a case which turns out to be intimately connected with her own backstory.
Over decades, a series of suburban fathers have been somehow persuaded to kill their families and themselves by mysterious hieroglyph letters signed ‘Longlegs’ and Harker’s insights are needed. The imagery is so ominous and gloomy – occasionally shrinking the frame to home movie academy ratio but mostly giving a widescreen windshield-while-cruising-through-fog view – that the hand of fate rather than screenwriting contrivance means Harker’s obsessive hoarding mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) knows more than she’s saying initially about Longlegs (Cage), a tittering, plasticky-faced, blonde-haired, high-pitched presence. This instrument of evil seems not to lay a hand on victims but channels doom from a lower power towards an array of innocents. In the course of the investigation, Harker visits the sole survivor of a Longlegs massacre – Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka), and isn’t Perkins great at character names? – and is given more ominous, personal forbodings. Rather than bring the Thomas Harris-style forensic and law enforcement resources of the FBI to the case, this trims away Harker’s support structure and leaves her only her own dubious psychic gifts to trace a monster who might be closer to home.
Like most Oz Perkins films, the details of the storyline get murky – it’s the sort of plot which makes less sense the more individual elements are examined, but with rational solutions falling apart the formless dread has space to grow. Significant moments hark back to the supervillain serial killer cycle: that house-to-house from Silence of the Lambs, the end-of-the-second-act apprehension of the ostensible big bad from Se7en, the happy families home movies from Manunter/Red Dragon, the coded messages from Zodiac. But Longlegs himself is a trickster – more Renfield than Dracula – and a distraction. An actor and the son of actors, Perkins has a knack for getting the most out of interesting women: Monroe, who has done good work in little-seen indies since her breakout in It Follows, is a compelling, spiky, unusual lead even in an era when autistic-presenting female detectives aren’t exactly thin on the ground. There are vivid, breathy creepy turns from Witt (who gets more to do as the film goes on) and Shipka (a veteran of The Blackcoat’s Daughter), who both move well beyond their teen scream queen days (Urban Legends, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) with raw, powerful studies in agony.
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