Though you do get a very brief glimpse of him within the first few moments of Longlegs, your first real introduction to Nicolas Cage in the title role of Osgood Perkins’s eerie serial killer horror is through the ominous opening credits sequence, which ends on the bleak promise of ‘Nicolas Cage as Longlegs’. It’s the first time I can recall a film using an acting credit as a threat to your audience, and it’s a threat that Perkins mostly manages to deliver on, granting Cage the chance to play a genuinely unnerving threat, the dark and cavernous heart of a chiller that superbly balances feel-bad tension and cathartic entertainment.
It’s a relentlessly risky and bold performance from a heavily made-up Cage, all effete mannerisms, sudden screams, and uncomfortable laughter, and Perkins knows that it’s the sort of show that works best in short bursts. In fact, in the first third of the film, we don’t see him at all, instead exclusively following our Silence of the Lambs-esque lead, young female FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), whose near-preternatural intuition lands her on the Longlegs case alongside veteran detective Carter (Blair Underwood). See, Longlegs doesn’t murder his victims outright – he’s a more Manson-esque figure, mysteriously persuading or forcing dads to kill their entirely families and then themselves, Longlegs’s presence only signified by the coded notes he leaves at the scene.
This first third is Longlegs at its best, supremely tense and unknowable, a real sense of danger emanating from the screen. Perkins generally keeps his camera tight to his characters, having us follow them as if we had our hands on their shoulders in a deeply upsetting conga line, but the times he lets the frame breathe will have your eyes playing tricks on you, convinced you’ve just seen movement somewhere in the corner, as if Longlegs is somehow everywhere at once.
Clever casting and incredible hair and make-up work make every female character we see bear a close resemblance to Cage as Longlegs, from Lee herself to her shut-in hoarder mother (played by Alicia Witt) to even the other female detectives on the case. It keeps Cage’s malign influence flitting around constantly, an effect enhanced by the judicious use of the man himself. Perkins mostly avoids big gore or jumpscares, less concerned with individual scares than a constant sense of dread – it’s a good choice, the atmosphere he creates really lingering after the credits roll.
As the plot builds, though, it does ask of itself a rather unstickable landing, and some of the final reveals and plot moves get too silly to really keep the suspension of disbelief going. But the journey there is so effective – and so unlike any of the other horror movies of recent years – that seeing Longlegs in a busy cinema is something you owe to yourself if you any love for this genre. After last year’s dismal Renfield, all I wanted was to have a director bold enough to let Cage really cut loose in a horror played as straight as possible and, with Longlegs, Osgood Perkins fully delivers on that promise.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 