With his new horror film Longlegs, writer-director Oz Perkins, son of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins, has constructed a sufficiently atmospheric thriller with a low-simmering unease that oozes throughout.
Just ask the highly successful viral marketing campaign featuring creepily cryptic trailers, cipher-laden billboards, a phone number to call and listen to ominous messages and a ‘90s-style website dubbed The Birthday Murders. In the end, a film poster appeared, exalting Longlegs as “the scariest movie of the decade.” That’s a bold claim.
In the film, It Follows actress Maika Monroe stars as Lee Harker, a possibly psychic FBI agent tasked by her commanding officer (Blair Underwood) with solving a string of grisly family murders. As Harker unravels the seemingly implausible killings through a series of Zodiac-esque ciphers found in letters left at crime scenes, she gradually grasps her own connection to the decades-spanning horrors.
Nicolas Cage contributes an overtly gonzo performance as the titular Longlegs, a serial killer with a love for ′70s-era glam rock who employs an unconventional method of carnage. Obscured in various ways for the better part of the film, Cage’s appearance is both unsettling and strangely comical once revealed. Longlegs’ pasty white face is a direct homage to Marc Bolan’s T. Rex stage makeup and Lou Reed’s Transformer cover art, which surreptitiously crops up in a few scenes. At times, Cage dials up disturbing moments while attempting to channel his inner Tiny Tim (the “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” musician; not the Dickens character). But no matter how accomplished his performance might be, or how obfuscating his prosthetics, one never fully looks past Nic Cage being, well, Nic Cage.
Longlegs’ greatest strengths lie in its disquieting score and cinematography. Its bewitchingly shot compositions and stylistic choices draw you in and add up to an anxious ambiance. Long shots of liminal space and aspect ratio changes deliver the claustrophobic feeling of being boxed in with the killer, yet, ultimately, Perkins chooses style over substance, and he’s a far better director than he is a writer. The frequent plot holes and leaps of logic leave a muddled mess for anyone paying close attention; the many reviews comparing this film to The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en are somewhat embarrassing.
Perkins, in fact, relies too heavily on coincidentally aligned circumstances and conveniently timed contrivances for any self-respecting film-lover to ignore. Satan is a merely convenient scapegoat for the evils enacted by Perkins’ characters, and the sloppy script becomes unavoidably apparent as the film progresses, leaving the last act reveal feeling ham-fisted rather than the stuff that would make up the promised “scariest movie of the decade.”
6
+Creepy ambiance; Nic Cage is fun even when he’s not
-Huge plot holes; lazy writing
Longlegs
Directed by Perkins
With Monroe, Underwood and Cage
Violet Crown, R, 101 min.