A chilling, half-remembered childhood encounter looms over “Longlegs,” Osgood Perkins’ stylishly composed 1990s horror film about a young FBI agent (Maika Monroe) whose past seems to hold the key to a decades-long string of serial killers in the suburbs.
In the opening flashback scene of “Longlegs,” a young girl walks out of her house and encounters a stranger in her snow-covered yard. We never see more than the lower half of his face, but the sense of creepiness is overwhelming. The screen cuts out with a scream before “Longlegs” gets off to a good start.
Twenty-five years later, that girl (Monroe’s Lee Harker) is now an adult and involved in the investigation. She’s preternaturally good at deciphering the serial killer’s choreographed targets, but her psychological acumen has a blind spot. In Osgood’s gripping if hackneyed horror film about an elusive bogeyman, the most unnerving mystery is the foggy, fractured nature of childhood memory.
“Longlegs,” which opens in theaters Thursday, is riding its own wave of mystery thanks to a lengthy, enigmatic marketing campaign. Is the buzz justified? That may depend on your tolerance for a very serious procedural that’s exceptionally adept at building an ominous slow burn, yet leads to an accumulation of horror tropes: satanic worship, creepy puppets, and a bizarre Nicolas Cage.
It is a credit to the grippingly mesmerizing first half of “Longlegs” – and to Monroe – that the film’s third act disappoints. After that prologue – presented in an angular proportion with rounded corners, as if looking through an overhead projector – the screen widens. A short, lonely detective, Harker is part of a large task force tasked with tracking down the killer behind the deaths of ten families over the course of thirty years. Sent to knock on doors, she looks up at a second-floor window and knows immediately. “That’s it,” she says to a partner (Dakota Daulby) whose lack of faith in her intuition quickly proves deplorable.
Harker is called in for a psychological examination that reveals her strange clairvoyance. Officer Carter (Blair Underwood) gives her all the evidence he’s collected, which points to the same killer (a coded letter signed by Longlegs is left at each murder scene), but at that point it points to no intruder. the houses of the murdered persons. Carter is reminiscent of Charles Manson. “Manson had accomplices,” Harker reminds him. Also disturbing: all the victims have a daughter with a birthday on the 14th of the month, a trait that Harker obviously shares.
Families also feature prominently in the story. Harker occasionally visits her incarcerated mother (Alicia Witt), and their brief interactions suggest an awareness of the cruelty of the world. Once on the phone, Harker tells her that she has been busy with “work stuff.”
“Dirty things?” asks the mother. “Yes,” she answers.
Terrifying scenes ensue as they hunt for the killer in rural Oregon. They visit the usual places: an old crime scene, a locked barn, an old witness in a psychiatric hospital. Longlegs (Cage) also sneaks around and leaves a letter for Harker. We see him briefly at first. He is a bleached, pale figure who, with long white hair, looks increasingly clownish the closer we get to him. If Manson belonged to the ’60s, Longlegs, with his white Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder Revue face, looks more like a product of the ’70s. T.Rex opens and closes the film and the album cover of Lou Reed’s “Transformer” sits above his mirror.
Perkins (“Gretel & Hansel”), is the filmmaking son of Anthony Perkins, who played one of the film’s most disturbing characters in Norman Bates of “Psycho.” The roots of “Longlegs,” which Perkins also wrote, have personal connections for the director, Perkins said, about his own upbringing and his father’s complicated private life. But something deeper struggles to break through ‘Longlegs’. The feeling of horror seems to come from few other films. ‘Se7en’ and ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ are clear touchstones. Longlegs ultimately feels more like a standard bogeyman and big-screen ship for Cage.
Anyway, this is Monroe’s movie. Her commanding screen presence in films like ‘It Follows’ and ‘Watcher’ has earned her the title of today’s preeminent ‘Scream Queen’. But she is much more than a talent for one genre. Time and again in “Longlegs,” Monroe’s Harker is confronted with a particularly disturbing scenario and walks straight in. It’s not that she isn’t nervous; her heavy breathing is part of Eugenio Battaglia’s artful sound design. Monroe, steely and strong, cuts like a knife through this almost cartoonishly strict film. Dirty things? Yes.
“Longlegs,” a Neon release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for bloody violence, disturbing images and some language. Running time: 101 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
