Gloom and evil fascinate Osgood Perkins. Implacable, patient, cruel malice permeates his films, and none more so than Longlegs, a nerve-racking and dour excursion into diabolical and gruesome terror. His films feel like a reaction to the recent trend in horror that posits the monster is more interesting than its victims – an idea that is often a crutch for weak filmmaking and worse character development. Even when Perkins’ protagonists find themselves sliding slowly to become the antagonist, it’s true, seeping, simmering, seething evil that is the ultimate threat, pervasive as fog or the smell of rot under your nose.
After the ghostly tone poem of his second feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and the middle European fairy tale witchery of Gretel & Hansel, Longlegs’ satanic murder mystery feels like a counterpart to Perkins’ debut, the equally diabolical The Blackcoat’s Daughter (aka February). And that’s not just because he reunites with the hellbound protagonist of his first film, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina star Kiernan Shipka, who plays the only known survivor of a butcherous and devious serial killer called Longlegs. She is just one part of the puzzle to be solved by Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, a veteran of battling unusual serial killers from It Follows and The Guest).
Perkins continues his taste for period pieces by setting Longlegs in the 1990s – the golden era, dramatically speaking, for the FBI in weird fiction. There’s an undoubted trace of Agent Clarice Starling about Harker, but there’s even more of Fox Mulder to her damaged psyche and connection to the uncanny. Her possible powers are the reason the FBI is letting this rookie loose on this bizarre case because, as her hard-drinking and hard-cursing boss (an excellently gruff Blair Underwood) explains, half a psychic is better than no psychic at all. But the underlying question is whether Harker is actually sensitive to the uncanny or has some specific connection to Longlegs.
The “who” is not the issue, as Perkins reveals Longlegs in an opening flashback to be an unrecognizable Nicolas Cage (unrecognizable, that is, until he opens his mouth and that birdlike, singsong voice scuttles across his white-painted and prosthetic-enhanced lips). It’s the “how” and increasingly the “what” that’s the real focus as Perkins scatters breadcrumbs before Harker to examine through detective work and supernatural leaps of logic. Monroe constructs her as a hollow woman, plagued by her relationship with her hoarder mother (Witt, another horror veteran from the original Urban Legend), haunted by the idea that there’s something just in the corner of her eye that’s keeping this killing spree unsolved.
There is, indeed, something lurking in every darkness. After the daylight terrors of Gretel & Hansel, here he’s playing in the periphery. Shadows become dense then dissipate. Demonic forms are echoed in everyday objects. Repeated patterns become rituals. The result can be overbearing, and deliberately so. The weight of evil that hangs over Harker’s investigation is oppressive and may simply be too much for some viewers. Much the same can be said for Cage, who engages in the kind of mega acting rarely seen in his current era of quieter performances like Pig and Arcadian. The absurdist costume design and delivery may initially seem like too much, especially when compared to Monroe – here, as in modern stalker classic Watcher, delivering a masterclass of understatement and internality. But Perkins’ greatest and most stomach-churning achievement is in a slow shift of perspective, leading the audience from the bleak and eerie serial killer thriller of Harker’s world to the fiendish reality of Longlegs, and an enigmatic denouement that will be puzzled over and studied. Hell truly awaits.
This article appears in July 12 • 2024.
