Longlegs (Osgood Perkins, 2024)

Three godfathers

Longlegs is haunted by three ghosts-- the eponymous serial killer (Nicholas Cage) who possesses the supernatural ability to pop up inside family's homes and end them; Anthony Perkins (father of the film's writer-director Osgood Perkins), who portrayed perhaps the most famed killer in all of cinema); and director Alfred Hitchcock, whose tremendous success with said film condemned Perkins Senior to a lifelong career of cheap knockoffs and increasingly inferior sequels. 

There's no doubt Perkins Junior is talented-- he has a knack for staging and shooting unnerving sequences and demonstrates this knack from the opening, when we're treated to a glimpse of Longlegs with the camera frame cutting off the upper half of his head. It's an ingenious visual device for a number of reasons: we get an idea of what the man looks like early on but only part of an idea; we get it through the eyes of a child of ten talking to someone taller than she is, when she's too scared to look directly at his face; and, weirdly, we're being slipped a sly Ozu tribute complete with low-angled shot and all (but don't quote me on that). 

Much of the film follows thusly: odd angled shots held for an interminable amount of time, stretching tension to the point of boredom without completely crossing over. Perkins wrings an unreasonable amount of dread from an open door at the end of a hallway, or an aisle in a library stack where absolutely nothing is happening. When our hero Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) sits at a table tapping at a laptop keyboard Perkins angles the camera just so that you see an open doorway over her shoulder and-- what's out there? A hallway? Anything moving in that hallway? Nothing, but she sits for an uncomfortably long time with her back to that doorway and the camera sits for an uncomfortably long time gazing at her not looking at that doorway you grow dead sure something's bound to happen. If as the Chinese believe there is such a thing as feng shui-- where forces of qi can flow and be directed, resulting in good fortune, or blocked, resulting in bad fortune-- then the locations in Perkin's films have enough blocked qi* to cause a geomancer the heebie jeebies. 

*(Oddly in Perkin's case it's not so much blockage as it is the empty still spaces that feel so disturbing; he's more skilled at provoking agoraphobia than the other kind)

Monroe takes her cue from Perkin's visual style-- actor and director are eerily in sync-- and plays Harker as if she's at the far end of the spectrum. During an FBI briefing she looks zoned out, her eyes staring flatly at nothing in particular; later when things happen (during a murder investigation she picks out a house and tells her partner "he's here;" later she's tested for precognitive abilities and doesn't look particularly surprised when she scores high) you being to wonder if perhaps she does see something and it's us that's missed the detail. Monroe is consistently beautifully understated through much of the film, such that when a thought or emotion flashes across her face it registers like an earthquake across serene landscape. 

The film has been compared to Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs and yes you see the basic details that inspired Perkins' script but Monroe uses the Agent Starling character less as model than as takeoff point; Agent Harker doesn't faze easy (tho that first killing does throw her off-balance), not the moist maggoty corpse nor the unnatural images; at a certain point it dawns on you that maybe moist horrors and unnatural images are nothing new, that if anything they're part of her daily life. Half the time I hope she catches the killer, half the time I suspect she is the killer-- it's a fascinating performance.

By contrast Nicolas Cage as Longlegs is so hilariously creepily over-the-top you can't help but think both his and Monroe's performances are informed by what Perkins Junior has seen of Perkins Senior's acting style-- the overbright vulnerability of Norman Bates the motelkeeper, the faraway gaze of Mrs. Bates the incarcerated killer (also much later his fearlessly unhinged performance as Reverend Peter Shane in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion). No Cage doesn't win our sympathy at any point; that's Monroe's function, despite her emotional distance (Or because of it? I like the carefully compact turtleshell quality). Perkins Senior manages to incarnate both, that's his singular achievement; Perkins Junior has the smarts to see this isn't possible, and split Norman up into protagonist and antagonist respectively.   

Not too crazy (skip the rest of this paragraph if you plan to see the film!) about the final half hour, where the supernatural is finally evoked, the name of Satan used in vain. And still Perkins could have pulled it off only he appears to have lost confidence and attempts to compensate by ratcheting the emotional intensity-- Monroe's somnambulistic Agent Harker waking and acting more like Agent Starling. Doesn't work, alas, and Perkins, as with many recent horror filmmakers, fails to stick the landing. 

If we're talking about sticking the landing Perkins could have listened to the voices in his head a little more closely. Hitchcock did it with Psycho-- the film (again, skip if you haven't seen!) ends with the killer caught, the case closed, the psychiatrist tying up all loose ends. Then a police officer delivers a blanket to the killer, explaining that the suspect is 'feeling cold,' and the film closes on the image of the killer sitting in a chair refusing to kill a fly. 

That's how to end a horror: with a still silent figure refusing to kill a fly. 

Still! An interesting film, one of the better horrors in a year full of horrors, on the big screen and in real life.