Longlegs
A forbidding atmosphere and a strong central character paper over the clichés in Osgood Perkins’ fourth horror film.
Murder by numbers: Maika Monroe
Image courtesy of A24
You’d expect the progeny of Norman Bates to know his horror. Osgood Perkins, the son of Anthony Perkins (star of Psycho), reaches deep into the lucky dip of our nightmares and gives us old time religion, nuns, creepy life-size dolls, mothers who hoard and Nicolas Cage at his most demented. It’s an uncomfortable watch, an elegantly executed piece and, best of all, boasts a central character who is more than just a scream queen, even if she is played by Maika Monroe.
It is the 1990s, Bill Clinton is in the White House and a series of horrific murders are following a grisly pattern. In a number of Oregon households, a family of four – two parents, two children – are found slaughtered by hammer, kitchen knife or shotgun without a trace of DNA or even a fingerprint of the killer, who signs off his deeds with the moniker ‘Longlegs.’ Lee Harker (scream queen Maika Monroe) is a rookie FBI agent who wouldn’t scream if you asked her. On her first day in the field, her partner is shot through the forehead and Lee carries on from there, picking up clues like a paranormal Miss Marple. She describes herself as “half-psychic” and she’s a boon to her superior, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), who watches in wonder as she cracks codes scattered in the wake of death. She already knows that the killer favours nine-year-old girls whose birthdays fall on the fourteenth of the month and in no time at all she has Nicolas Cage’s number: 666.
Cage, who also serves as producer, is bent on creating a figure as memorably crazed as Leatherface and Pennywise and throws himself into the arms of evil in a fright wig and grotesque, almost porcine make-up (cf. Pig). On the one hand, then, we have the sober, unsmiling Lee Harker with her cryptological wiles, and on the other the cackling, histrionic Longlegs (cf. Nicolas Cage in Renfield).
Positioning his players in a foreboding atmosphere of grey, rain-washed Oregon streets (filmed in and around Vancouver), Osgood Perkins is at pains to unsettle his audience from the get-go, laying on a soundtrack of prickly violins and chattering cow bells. The effect is more unnerving and uncomfortable than full-out terrifying, but then horror comes in a variety of hues. Borrowing from the arsenal of such serial killer classics as The Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac, Perkins summons up a nightmarish world with a rough approximation of our own, but with the tropes of the familiar that never lets us forget that we are just watching a movie, albeit a distinctive one of its genre. Sleep tight.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby, Lauren Acala, Rryla McIntosh, Ava Kelders, Carmel Amit.
Dir Osgood Perkins, Pro Dan Kagan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Nicolas Cage, Dave Caplan and Chris Ferguson, Screenplay Osgood Perkins, Ph Andrés Arochi, Pro Des Danny Vermette, Ed Greg Ng and Graham Fortin, Music Zilgi, Costumes Mica Kayde, Sound Eugenio Battaglia.
C2 Motion Picture Group/Traffic./Range/Oddfellows/Saturn Films-Black Bear Pictures UK.
100 mins. USA/Canada. 2023. UK and US Rel: 12 July 2024. Cert. 15.
