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| An eerie and viciously red font across an ominous still of a girl in front of her snow-draped house looking back at someone unseen make up this effective poster for Osgood Perkins' Longlegs |
Lee Harker is a young female FBI agent who is tasked with North America's most confounding serial killer, an unknown, letter-leaving perp who seemingly gets normal families to eradicate themselves completely.
Longlegs is written and directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat's Daguhter (2015)).
Successfully marketed in a The Blair Witch Project (1999) type online focused scheme and critically hyped beyond reason, Perkins arrives in a big way after 3 mostly unnoticed prior efforts (and a 2020 The Twilight Zone episode), all of them similar horror mood pieces with satanic elements.
Longlegs starts well and succeeds in creating suspense early on, especially in a scene in Harker's home. The film seems to intentionally make you think of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Se7en (1995), but neither of the these comparisons to towering films in the horror-thriller genre are to Longlegs's advantage.
The film is packaged so neatly, made with such self-assured style, - changing formats, color choices, unusual compositions and music, - all working to the film's 'hip' appeal: Maika Monroe (It Follows (2014)) is the strange Harker, whose prowess is explained early on by the deux ex machina writing trick of 'she's psychic'. SPOILER It seems unprofessional that she doesn't act on or report when the mass murderer comes to her home, but then her boss (Blair Underwood (Bad Hair (2020)) is no paragon of professional inspiration himself. SPOILER Longlegs veers from its rolemodels' realistic serial killer narratives, as it becomes clear that its killer has supernatural powers (from Satan), which he infuses his unlucky victims with through freaky dolls that a strange fake nun (Harker's hoarder mother) brings into their homes and then removes again after their deaths.
Cult icon actor Nicolas Cage (The Croods (2013)), who also co-produced the film, gives a strange performance as the strange Longlegs, singing, moving and screaming as only Cage could do. Stills of rock music icons Lou Reed and The Cure front man Robert Smith hang on the walls of Longlegs' strange dollmaker dungeon home, and he himself looks like a Smith look-a-like, who has undergone several facial filler injections and a nose job. Little to nothing in terms of details are given about the man. Cage looks strange more than scary, and he never hurts anyone other than himself by his own hands in the film. We move into The Boys from Brazil (1978) territory, and you may also think of Psycho (1960), the perennial horror classic starring Anthony Perkins, director Osgood's father. There's a deep, driving paternal connection to Perkins' career, and he seems to think of himself as a horror savant, and now one with huge success. But the referenced pictures are all infinitely better than Perkins' own creations. Longlegs is not without merit at all, but it is also something of a copycat card-in-a-hat trick. 'She's psychic.' 'The devil did it.' Alright then. Never truly haunting.
Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: 10 mil. $
Box office: 90.5 mil. $ and counting
= Mega-hit (has returned 9 times its cost so far)
[Longlegs premiered 31 May (Beyond Fest, USA) and runs 101 minutes. The budget has only been revealed as 'under 10 mil. $'. Shooting took place from January - February 2023 in British Columbia, Canada. The marketing budget was also 'under 10 mil. $'. The film opened #2, behind holdover hit Despicable Me 4, to a 22.4 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another 2 weekends in the top 5 (#4-#5), grossing 71.2 mil. $ so far. The film is slated to open in 10 more international markets, including big markets like Mexico and Italy. Perkins returns with The Monkey (2025). Monroe returns in In Cold Light; Cage in The Gunslingers (2025) or The Prince (2025). Longlegs is certified fresh at 86 % with a 7.50/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Longlegs?
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