Bram Stoker and Thomas Harris Collide in Oz Perkins' Serial Killer Thriller Longlegs

LONGLEGS 

(Osgood Perkins, USA, 2024, 101 minutes) 

As a director, Osgood "Oz" Perkins has a feel for atmosphere. 

Each of his four features looks and feels a particular way, even as he's worked with three different cinematographers (Andrés Arochi shoots  everything here with funhouse-style wide-angle lenses). The films all fall within the horror genre, they're all rather deliberately paced, and they're all predicated on action more than words. Except for 2020's Gretel & Hansel, a decidedly feminist take on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, he writes all of his scripts, including Longlegs, his latest with Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage. 

Considering Monroe's track record in horror--especially The Guest, It Follows, and Watcher--I had high hopes about this pairing (Monroe is now working on They Follow, David Robert Mitchell's long-in-the-works sequel to It Follows). She has a certain grounded quality, which makes it easy to root for her to triumph over whatever over-the-top terrors filmmakers should throw her way, from brainwashed soldiers to psychopathic janitors. 

That's true here, too, though she's never played a character exactly like FBI agent Lee Harker. Possibly because of the way she was raised, Harker is better at dealing with signs and symbols than human beings--she's so bad at banter, in fact, that it's kind of funny. I would assume her surname is a nod to Mina Harker, the amateur detective in Bram Stoker's Dracula, not least since Perkins is an avid fan of Tod Browning's 1931 adaptation (below). If that's the case, then Blair Underwood's Agent Carter (no relation to the Marvel secret agent) is the film's designated Van Helsing and Cage's prosthetic-encrusted Dale Cobble, aka "Longlegs," is the film's Dracula. 

In addition to Mina Harker, Lee recalls Clarice Starling in Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs. Just as Clarice grew up without parents, Lee grew up without a father--and her mother (Alicia Witt, a former child actor like Perkins) is a loony tune. Lee also refuses to let anything deter her from solving a series of murders in which Longlegs appears to have been involved. And they must want to get caught, because they keep leaving Zodiac-like messages for her to decode. These sequences recall David Fincher's film of the same name.

The murders themselves recall the from-out-of-nowhere kills in Larry Cohen's God Told Me To, in which seemingly ordinary men snap and transform into murderers, uttering "God told me to" before taking their own lives. If Longlegs sounds like a synthesis of superior novels and films, that's exactly right. It looks like Perkins' work, but most every plot development feels familiar, and I felt much the same about his second film, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and The Blackcoat's Daughter, which this one most closely resembles in regards to an outside force controlling a character's actions--Kiernan Shipka even returns in a small role.

If Longlegs is this film's most original creation, Cage's go-for-broke performance aside, it's also one of the weakest. Your mileage may vary, but the more Lee learns about the lurker, with whom she has a certain connection--not the one you might think--the sillier things get. Suffice to say, dolls are involved. Neon was wise to tease the character in their marketing materials, because it creates the expectation of something terrifying, rather than something ridiculous. And possibly even problematic. 

In addition to Longlegs' penchant for cackling with abandon, the high voice, long hair, feminized features, and It's Pat-like wardrobe render the character genderless. I'm not suggesting they're meant to be nonbinary. I suspect Perkins was just going for what-the-fuck weirdness. Then again, I would like to think that Jonathan Demme meant no offense by the cross-dressing, serial-killing Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill, in his Oscar-winning adaptation of Silence of the Lambs, except Ted Levine's baroque take on the character has long been a thorn in the side of trans viewers--like Matrix codirector Lilly Wachowski--even among those who otherwise love him and his work. 

It's possible that Longlegs represents Perkins' first horror comedy, except Neon didn't market the film that way, and most of the humor feels unintentional, except for Lee's enjoyably awkward banter with Agent Carter's daughter, Ruby. If anything, the film could've used more sequences like that. 

And as much as I love T. Rex, he never makes the lyrics to "Bang a Gong (Get It on)" serve any real purpose, other than as an excuse to quote iconic Marc Bolan lyrics like, "You've got the teeth of the hydra upon you." And to establish that Longlegs is a glam rock fan--so, I guess they aren't all bad?

As with his other films, Perkins creates intriguing mysteries, only to give too much away at the end. Longlegs is no exception, though the character itself remains a bit of a question mark...leaving the door open to a prequel should the filmmaker, and his studio, be so inclined to milk the weirdness further.

Mostly, I credit him with creating something original out of pre-existing material--if you're gonna steal, steal from the best--and even if Longlegs is my least favorite of his films, I look forward to seeing what he does next, and I already know what it is: The Monkey, an adaptation of the Stephen King story. As he told The Hollywood Reporter, "It's deliberately comedic."

Longlegs opens at Seattle multiplexes on Fri, July 12, and at SIFF Cinema Uptown on July 16. Images: the IMDb (Maika Monroe), Universal Pictures (Helen Chandler as Mina in Dracula), and Den of Geek (Nicolas Cage).