Director/Screenplay – Osgood Perkins, Producers – Nicolas Cage, Dave Caplan, Chris Ferguson, Dan Kagan & Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Photography – Andres Arochi Tinajero, Music – Zilgi, Visual Effects – Niche Effects (Supervisor – Edward J. Douglas), Special Effects Supervisor – Dan Keeler, Makeup Effects Designer – Werner Pretorious, Production Design – Danny Vermette. Production Company – Traffic./Range and Oddfellows/Saturn Films.
Cast
Maika Monroe (Agent Lee Harker), Nicolas Cage (Longlegs/Dale Kobble), Blair Underwood (Agent William Carter), Alicia Witt (Ruth Harker), Michelle Choi-Lee (Agent Browning), Lauren Alcala (Young Lee Harker), Kiernan Shipka (Carrie Anne Camera), Dakota Daulby (Agent Fisk), Ava Kelders (Ruby Carter), Carmel Amit (Anna Carter)
Plot
It is the 1990s. Lee Harker is a rookie agent with the FBI. On her first assigned case, she has an intuitive hunch that the killer they are searching for door-to-door is in a particular house and is proved right, even as her partner is shot. Lee is taken on by Agent Carter who believes that she has some psychic insight. She is placed onto the case of a killer who has operated for thirty years, somehow entering houses to kill families but leaving no trace except for an unsolved cryptogram that he signs Longlegs. Lee is able to solve the cryptogram, finding that Longlegs kills around the birthdays of the girls of the house. Longlegs then leaves a taunting message in her home. Through the investigation, Lee realises that Longlegs’ trail reaches back into her own past and how he approached her as a child back in 1974.
Osgood Perkins, sometimes also credited as Oz Perkins, has been a genre director whose rise has been fascinating to watch in the last few years. Perkins first appeared with the enigmatic The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) and the ghost story I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), both of which gained reasonable word of mouth. I was very impressed with his third film Gretel & Hansel (2020), a dark take on the fairytale. Subsequent to this, Perkins went on to direct the Stephen King adaptation The Monkey (2025). Perkins has also written the scripts for the thriller Cold Comes the Night (2013) and the horror films Removal (2010) and The Girl in the Photographs (2015), plus has several acting credits. Longlegs was Perkins’ fourth film as director and his biggest success to date.
The Serial Killer Thriller began in the 1990s with the huge critical and awards success of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which introduced a fascination with FBI behavioural profiling techniques. This was followed by a fad for other such films employing forensic detective work and behavioural profiling. The serial killer thriller faded away by the end of the 1990s, although there have been some revivals since then. Mostly the behavioural profiling and forensic thriller has faded into the woodwork of various CSI, NCIS and Criminal Minds tv shows.
Longlegs is an ostensible revival of the serial killer thriller, but it also ends up being one that readily abandons it. Certainly, the film has many aspects that lap over onto other works from the genre. Maika Monroe is an intuitive genius with possible psychic hunches a la Frank Black in tv’s Millennium (1996-9). Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs is outfitted in an old lady wig, lipstick and pale-faced makeup that resembles maybe a senior version of the gender-bending killer in The Silence of the Lambs. The killer sending cryptograms recalls something of The Zodiac Killer, while the killer who targets whole families harkens back to Manhunter (1986) or Red Dragon (2002).
Maika Monroe as FBI Agent Lee Harker
That said, while the film has received some very good plaudits and is Osgood Perkins’ most successful yet, I don’t think Longlegs works that well as a serial killer thriller. One of the posters for the film went out with the legend “the scariest film of the decade”, which seems like hyperbole that is only setting things up for disappointment. The thing that The Silence of the Lambs fired like a bolt through the staid detective story genre and policier was a focus on behavioural patterns and detective work using forensic minutiae. We see one or two scenes here where Maika Monroe makes stabs at predicting the behaviour of the killer. On the other hand, there is very little of a detective story to anything that happens. When Maika presents Blair Underwood with her analysis of the cryptograms and her deduction that it takes place set around calendar dates, it is a fait accompli where we see no steps as to how she arrived at that conclusion as any good detective story should give us.
Osgood Perkins is a lover of the slow burn film. Longlegs is a film that embodies this to a way that I found distracting. Most of the film is shot in 2.39:1 widescreen Scope format with some of the flashback scenes dropping into 1.33:1, the format usually associated with home movies. That said, Perkins rarely employs any kinds of closeups – most of the film is shot in terms of medium and wide angles where the characters are constantly standing in the middle of a room some distance away from the camera. The lighting of the film gives everything an unnatural pallor as though we are looking at the world through dim 1970s fluorescent lighting fed through modern desaturated colour processing. Just like the scene where Maika Monroe goes to talk to Blair Underwood’s daughter, the dialogue itself feels cut off and Maika Monroe’s character frequently hesitant.
Certainly, there are times that Osgood Perkins jolts us out of our desaturated lassitude – with abrupt axe hackings in another room in long shot or the unexpected shooting of supporting FBI agents (twice). And Nicolas Cage goes completely off the rails and gives another of his crazy man performances – in weird sotto voce, old lady makeup and wig, shrieking as he drives his car about “mummy” or bashing his head against the table in the interrogation room. (Although one of the film’s big plausibility holes is how someone so completely nuts could inspire such a fanatical following, let alone mastermind schemes that take years to hatch).
On the other hand, the more Longlegs goes on, the less coherent any explanation of what is going on becomes. The whole film becomes a sand castle of stretched improbabilities and things that don’t make a lot of sense. [PLOT SPOILERS]. The ending gives us Alicia Witt – who I can still remember as an eight-year old child actor in David Lynch’s Dune (1984), now as a mother around retirement age having made a deal with Longlegs to protect her daughter. I wasn’t clear if this was an explanation for Maika’s seeming intuitions or not. It seems a whopping coincidence that we can go from a girl to whom a deal was made with the killer by her mother to the same girl becoming an FBI agent who just happens to get assigned to the very same case hunting said killer where her involvement is central. It is also not clear how Longlegs manages to affect families to murder their own children – at the end of the film, Blair Underwood just vanishes off into the kitchen and abruptly returns and starts killing. Nor is it clear what the significance of the dolls is meant to be – the lifelike doll is introduced and then simply dropped and never dealt with again.
