Review: Longlegs

Image courtesy of Neon.

The best entries in the serial killer thriller genre - namely, "Zodiac," "The Silence of the Lambs," "Seven," and the gone-too-soon show "Mindhunter" - understand that it's often the atmosphere and vibes, rather than the plotting, that should do the heavy lifting. "Longlegs," the new film from Osgood Perkins - son of Anthony, AKA Norman Bates - takes a deeply unsettling vibe and rides it to great success for about 100 minutes.

The film opens with a scene that I'm unlikely to soon forget. Set sometime in the 1970s - although the majority of the picture takes place in the mid-1990s - we open on a snow-covered farm where a little girl thinks she hears someone calling to her on the property. She finally stumbles upon a man, who wishes her a happy birthday and the scene makes a jolting cut to the film's title card. This may not sound particularly frightening, but trust me when I say that it's all about the vibes.

In the film's version of the present - 1995, I believe - young FBI agent Lee Harker, a taciturn young woman who clearly feels uncomfortable with anyone outside of work-related purposes, and another agent are scoping a neighborhood for a serial killer on the loose. Something unexplainable tells Lee which house is the right one, and she nabs herself a murderer. Her boss (Blair Underwood) seems suspicious of the young recruit's almost psychic instincts, but he also doesn't shy away from utilizing them in a case that has baffled the department.

Lee quickly finds herself drawn into the case - and it appears that she might even have a personal connection to it - as she tracks a mysterious man known as Longlegs, a serial killer with a T. Rex fixation (Marc Bolan, not the dinosaur) who leaves notes at the scenes of crimes that he doesn't so much commit, but rather inspires, that are filled with coded language and references to Satan.

Longlegs is played by Nicolas Cage in a manner that is bizarre and inspired in the way that only that particular actor can do bizarre and inspired. There's a scene in which he shrieks out a series of plaintive yelps about his mommy and daddy while driving in a car, and it wouldn't surprise me if Cage just summoned this up on the spot, rather than it having appeared in the script. 

Cage has leaned into the weird characters he has played in recent years, but this one is a whole other level of bonkers. And yet, it doesn't distract from - in fact, it adds to - the increasingly tight knot the film wraps around the viewer's throat. This is an intense and strange movie.

Without giving too much away, the crime scenes involving Longlegs - which are spread out from the late 1960s through the 1990s - are not so much murders committed by Cage's character, but rather instances in which fathers slaughter entire households, seemingly at the inspiration or command of Longlegs and a mysterious presence that he refers to as "Mr. Downstairs."

The picture bears some obvious resemblances to "The Silence of the Lambs" - a young female FBI agent tracking a serial killer in a film filled with woodland sequences - but Perkins' picture is far weirder and there's a supernatural element that begins to infiltrate the plot increasingly as the picture moves along. 

That being said, there's an information dump late in the film as to what's going on that zaps a little of the mystery out of the whole thing. The film is still overall highly effective, although keeping its plot elements more under wraps might have made it even better.

Perkins' previous work - the eerie "Hansel & Gretel" adaptation and especially the sinister "The Blackcoat's Daughter" - prove that he has a mastery of unsettling horror films. "Longlegs" feels like a major step up for him and it's a triumph of mood and tone. In a summer of (so far) mostly forgettable blockbuster movies, this is one that will likely long stick in the memory.