Most of the horror community loves a good serial killer story. As morbid as it is, there are hundreds of thousands of hours of true crime podcasts, TV series, and films that either recount the true events of innocent people being dispatched by a depraved mind or take inspiration from these murders to create fictional accounts. In Oz Perkins’ Longlegs, we get a serial killer story wrapped in a police procedural suspended in a dark nightmare.
Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is a green FBI agent who is awkwardly quiet. After a traumatic incident resulting in her partner being killed, her superiors learn that Lee has a knack for “knowing” things. Her hunches prove to pan out, and they want her to give them new insight into some disturbing decades-long murders – fathers killing their families, leaving an aftermath of bloody devastation.
Taking to the task immediately, she looks for patterns and scouring cryptic letters written with a unique alphabet left by someone called “Longlegs.” As she digs deeper into these apparent Satanic ritualistic killings, she senses a connection she can’t quite figure out. With only her hoarder mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), and her superior, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), to talk to, Lee is determined to find the killer before another family is decimated.
Perkins, whose Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In the House sealed his unique style with horror, has said that Longlegs is a “horror movie mixtape,” and it shows. There are obvious nods to The Silence of the Lambs, which Perkins has directly mentioned, as well as Se7en, and I’ll throw in The Amityville Horror for good measure.
There is plenty to like outside of the horror greatest hits nods though. Audiences will be held by Monroe’s skill at being stoic while still capturing a multitude of emotions, Witt’s glassy-eyed fervour and Underwood’s confident turn as Lee’s snappy mentor. The cinematography by Andrés Arochi and the immersive sound design by Eugenio Battaglia also makes the film stand out as something quite unique. The story itself was intriguing, the glimpses of Longlegs and his evil machinations were fascinating, and I would loved for the film to have taken a deeper dive into this world.
One of the draws for the film is to see Nicolas Cage in action. We all know how he can brilliantly chew up a scene, and doesn’t disappoint here, but this time he’s almost too bombastic. Paired with the bizarre makeup, that isn’t explained in the film, and the lack of an origin story for Longlegs, his character lacks the depth needed to truly be a memorable villain.
Longlegs is a creepy, thrilling serial killer story with gorgeous cinematography, a great performance by Monroe, and bone-chilling sound design. However, the pieces don’t always fit as they should; when they do, the story comes at you hard and fast without giving the audience enough time to speculate or create their own theories before the twists are revealed.
I love Perkins and the worlds he creates, and I think they have intentional connections, especially with Longlegs. I’ll let the audience figure out which ones, and I sincerely hope he stays in this nightmarish landscape, but he’ll need to give us even more connective tissue to sustain characters and motives.
