Longlegs (2024) ★ ★

I went into this movie thinking of the only true horror film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, "The Silence of the Lambs," and expected writer/director Osgood Perkins to deliver. The son of Anthony Perkins ("Psycho") and Berry Berenson ("Remember My Name"), Perkins has filmmaking in his blood, so my hope that he would move the ball forward from Jonathan Demme's 1991 classic seemed a reasonable one. Instead, "Longlegs" turned out to be a massive disappointment. 

All the right fixins' are here: good cast (Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood), good cinematography (Andés Arochi), good sound design (Joe Dzuban and Zach Seivers), and good idea -- make Cage a monster, Buffalo Bill style. Yet somehow the film falls flat and lacks substance, dimension, animus, and most of all, scares. There is much ado about "Longlegs" in the online film community, with many hailing it as "almost perfect" and "the scariest movie of the last ten years," and I can't help but wonder if I saw the same film -- this is a horror movie? 

The story revolves around Monroe's character, FBI Special Agent Lee Harker, whose character is yet another victim of "serious face" writing. "Serious face" is the fairly recent and unfortunate trend of Hollywood only green-lighting characters that are written with one solitary emotional affect from start to finish. Usually that affect is grim, unsmiling, and you guessed it, serious. I don't blame Maika Monroe for Harker's incredible lack of dimensionality, because the entire film is dipped in the same sad sauce, so what was she supposed to do? Smiling was probably forbidden, so Harker never does. 

Anyway, she has a bit of a sixth sense, able to detect the exact whereabouts of lurking evil. This is demonstrated in a scene at the beginning of the story, where her superior, Agent Carter (Underwood), assigns her to the Longlegs case—a series of unnamed serial killings in which fathers have murdered their families and then themselves. The murders are connected by the same cryptically coded note left at every crime scene, the only evidence that a serial killer is responsible. With a fresh murder uncovered, Harker finds herself feeling mysteriously connected to the ghostly killer, and uses her telepathy and intuition to track down Longlegs and whoever is helping him. 

There are a few major twists to this narrative, and at least one of them is pretty surprising; the concept of Longlegs is without a doubt the movie's strong suit. Cage plays the character as he plays all characters -- over the top -- and delivers a fascinating performance. Fascinating, but not scary. And here is the most puzzling thing about this film: at no point was I even the slightest bit chilled by what was on screen. Yes, the makeup and weird androgynous voice of the title character are creepy, but something prevents Longlegs from feeling like a threat. Perhaps it's knowing that his crimes are committed by someone else? Or that he wears more makeup than the female FBI agent sitting across from him in the interrogation room?

There's a bizarre scene in which Cage's character enters a hardware store to buy something, and the young checkout girl, maybe fifteen, asks if he needs anything else. He then starts wiggling his hands around and speaking in "creepy voice," which should disturb her, but clearly doesn't. Instead she casually yells to her dad that the "creepy old man" is back. If she's not scared, why should I be? 

Another problem is that the movie blows its wad way, way too early. When will screenwriters learn that "scary" only works when what precedes it is comfortable? I was never scared, but I was always uncomfortable watching "Longlegs." How could I not be? In the very first scene of the film, we get a direct taste of the ominous weirdness of Longlegs. Harker's investigation is broken up by not-coincidental visits with her mom in the home she grew up in. Alicia Witt plays Ruth Harker, a clear nutcase from take one. Every dark corner, every long shadow, the wintery coldness of Perkins's vision for this film was all overcooked, which made the potential frights indistinguishable from everything else. 

"Longlegs" suffers from one other fatal flaw: there is no mystery. Based on everything we are shown, it is a forgone conclusion that Longlegs is the killer, Longlegs is a Satanist, Longlegs has help, and with the extremely limited number of characters, we can deduce within thirty minutes who the help is. The Satanic angle is interesting, but a dead end, literally and figuratively, for every character on screen. And when the final credits roll, I asked myself the thing that nobody seems to be asking: why are there no computers? 

The film is set in the nineties -- computers were everywhere in the nineties, yet none of the agents use one. That was a little scary. 

                                                                                                                                -- Bill Fontaine