Longlegs is a bunch of 1990s serial killer movie cliches masquerading as prestige horror. And not the good 1990s serial killer movie cliches. Need the killer to leave personalised messages at the murder scene for the lead FBI agent, written in an alphabet of coded hieroglyphs that only she can translate? Longlegs is your movie. Need the killer to follow an obscure pattern of dates that form a shape when they are typed out on a page just so? Longlegs is your movie. Need the killer to kill without leaving fingerprints as though he were never in the house? Longlegs is your movie.
Need a movie to scare you, intrigue you, ensnare you, entertain you, or just keep you from laughing out loud for the better part of two hours? Look elsewhere.
It pains this critic to deliver such a harsh verdict against Longlegs, and it may surprise this reader to read it, given that the initial buzz for Oz Perkins’ film was loud, and for a time it had a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. It pains this critic because Perkins’ 2015 film The Blackcoat’s Daughter is, without hyperbole, one of the best and scariest horror movies of the 21st century. Perkins’ other films have been worthy, though not as worthy, examples of prestige horror. But the only explanation for such good notices for Longlegs is that there has been some sort of mass hypnotism among the people who watched it, and only a few stalwart minds are free from it.
The title character is played by Nicolas Cage, and what might have been kept as a nice surprise is ruined by the choice to reveal it in the opening credits. Not just that Cage is in the movie, but that he plays Longlegs. Nonetheless, Perkins gives us only glancing views of his stringy-haired monster with the sing-songy voice – actually a man, nothing supernatural – as if trying to withhold the horror of his antagonist like he were the shark in Jaws. Then at some point, without fanfare, Perkins just starts showing him to us, and pity that, because Cage looks like Robert Smith of The Cure bleached white and aged ten years, reaching for the hammiest extremes of his range in a vain attempt to scare or even disquiet us.
Someone like Longlegs should be scary, as he appears to have been responsible for ordinary men going crazy and killing their whole families over a period of decades, at set intervals that have to do with the birthdays of a young girl in the family. He targets girls turning nine years old on the 14th of the month, though he doesn’t repeat any months, and confusingly, the murders don’t actually take place on the 14th, but within a few days on either side. This weak sauce numerology has something to do with killing in the shape of an inverted triangle over all those years, though we don’t discover that until later.
On the case is FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who makes Clarice Starling look like a downright extrovert. Lee seems to have some sort of extra sensory perception, because while knocking on doors with her partner, she gets a “feeling” that the killer is in the house on the other side of the street. He isn’t, but a man who appears to have killed his whole family is, likely under the influence of Longlegs. How Lee knew this is touched on but generally discarded, like so much of the loose spaghetti that doesn’t stick to the wall in this movie.
Since the 14th of a new month is coming up – and since Lee’s analysis of the pattern has determined that another killing is due, even though sometimes they are years apart – Lee investigates with a senior agent, Carter (Blair Underwood), who is constantly sitting under a portrait of Bill Clinton in his office, just in case you forget for five minutes that this is the 1990s. His role is to throw cold water on all her hunches but still be supportive. Don’t you know you never distrust the hunches of the closed-off young FBI agent who had a trauma in her youth and emerged as a brilliant savant investigator as a result?
The first disappointment to get over while watching Longlegs is the idea that you thought it might be a horror movie. Perkins has experience with body horror in his previous efforts, as there are some particularly grisly moments involving human viscera in his film Gretel & Hansel, for example. You can tell he wants to go there, here, with a few moments that are meant to shocks us or churn our stomachs. The thing is, anyone who saw Se7en knows that these are also signature aspects of the serial killer movie, and the lingering exhaustion from the way these tropes played out 30 years ago is enough to explain why you don’t see a lot movies with these basic buiding blocks anymore.
If it seemed like Perkins were intentionally trying to revive that form, that would be something. It does not seem like that. It seems like Perkins dredged up a lot of tired signifiers, props, and other serial killer ephemera with the idea that he was producing something new, and then gave it to us with a straight face, asking for our minds to be blown by a person who communicates in code and seems to have a personal relationship with the FBI agent.
For a time, Longlegs disguises its ineptness through moody moments and a general competency with the core aspects of filmmaking, like editing and camerawork. Ultimately, we realise this is part of the ineptness. Any pretty pictures we see here are gussying up old, tired ideas that were in such shallow hibernation, we point at them and call out their very insipidness the moment they identify themselves.
There are major aspects to the story that have not been revealed out of a general professional courtesy, but suffice it to say that they only complicate the already murky clarity of all the symbols, numbers, tired religious iconography, and insert shots of slithering snakes that compete for our attention. The final indignity is that Longlegs concludes on a note where you may have to ask yourself what was supposed to have just happened. Even when the filmmaker means for that to be the ending, it can be frustrating. When a film is made as haphazardly as Longlegs, it’s just laughable.
Longlegs is currently playing in cinemas.