By Michael Kalafatis
Longlegs is available to watch on Apple TV+.
★★★★☆
“Cuckoo! There she is, the Almost Birthday Girl. Oh, but… it seems I wore my long legs today.”
In the 1990s, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), an FBI agent, is assigned a series of murder/suicide cases by her supervisor William Carter (Blair Underwood). These cases all involve the father killing his family and himself, and there is always a letter left at the crime scene with Satanic coding and signed Longlegs. Harker’s job is to find how does Longlegs manages each time to convince the father of each family to kill his own wife and kids, a pattern that has occurred to every murder that Longlegs has left his cryptic letters. Harker finds it hard to gather any proof that this elusive serial killer was even inside the house when the murders happened, and the letters are the only piece of evidence indicate that maybe Longlegs was involved with these gruesome killings.
Nicholas Cage plays Longlegs, a character whose face we do not see clearly for most of the film’s narrative, we only get his fragmented appearances: like glimpses of his face, scenes of his hands or his profile. This incomplete image of Longlegs’ appearance is very effective and unique and creates an aura of mystery and menace from the start of the film. His face is only shown when we get towards the end of the film’s narrative, a face that manages to convey his evil personality before he even utters a single word. These fragmented images of Longlegs are like a puzzle that Perkins (the director) wants us to solve before we see his face, a face that does not resemble Cage’s in the slightest, a very disturbing face and which is unlike any human being just like his personality.
Most films that feature serial killers as the main antagonists their facial or body characteristic are never shown until the climax of the narrative, they only appear as characters out of focus or voices on a telephone. Longlegs differs because it uses its antagonist as an active character who from the start, we can feel his malevolent and disturbing presence.
Maika Monroe’s Harker is a character who we do not usually see in a role of police officer, she is very awkward in social interactions and a very introvert person who does not seems to have any close friends. Her unusual behavior is more evident in one particular scene where she has to drive her drunk supervisor home, when they arrive, he asks her to come inside to meet his family, but she answers, “Um, Sir, do I have to?” Harker’s only person who she talks to outside of work is her mother, who she sometimes calls or visits.
Longlegs director Osgood Perkins is the son of Antony Perkins who was also a director, but he was also an actor who famously portrayed Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s’ Psycho (1960). Just like in Psycho, Longlegs is a very atmospheric and unpredictable film, that also put emphasis on an unhealthy relationship between a parent and her child. But David Fincher’s Seven (1995) has the most obvious influence on Perkins’ film, both films use de-saturated color tones, a highly intelligent serial killer and attention to detail (Satanic cameo that appears all throughout Longlegs, mostly on the background). Longlegs will also be compared to Silence of the Lamb (1991) which kind of makes sense because both films have horror elements and disturbing central antagonists who are always one step ahead of our protagonists and a strong female lead.
The musical score is written by Zilgi, who is known as Elvis Brooke Perkins (Osgood’s brother), he creates a very minimalistic and eerie score that feels very organic to the film’s themes. The score envelopes the film in a dark soundscape that uses various electronic sounds, violins and drone sounds, that are meant to convey a sense of uneasiness and dread. The soundtrack also manages to enhance the horror elements of the film, without drawing too much attention to itself, while also working in harmony with Longlegs’ central themes of parenthood, memory and preternatural evil.
There are many tracking shots of Harker, especially in the beginning of the film, when she goes to the various crime scenes. These tracking shots place us in Harker’s point of view because like her, we do not know what to expect, her walking to a crime scene gives us time to think what gruesome things await us. The use of tracking shots is reminiscent of the way Stanley Kubrick uses tracking shots in The Shining (1980) when he follows Danny as he rides his tricycle on the corridors of the Overlook Hotel, Kubrick ‘s uses tracking shots to create dread, because when Danny turns on every corner, we expect something horrible to happen and when it does not happens, we are relieved, but he eventually meets the twin sisters and the camera comes to a halt.
Longlegs is a very stylish film that blends the genres of horror and psychological thriller in a very meticulous and creative way. It is very engrossing and very unpredictable and has great performances from Nicholas Cage and Maika Monroe.