Longlegs: The Sleeper Indie Hit with Nothing to Show for It
This ain't no Silence of the Lambs
Longlegs is the latest horror hit from director Oz Perkins starring Maika Monroe as an FBI agent tracking down an occultist serial killer played by Nicolas Cage. If you haven’t heard, Longlegs has raked over fifty million dollars on a shoestring budget of about ten million dollars in a crowded summer season. Neon’s unique online marketing strategy and the film’s low budget should be applauded in an industry run rampant with bloated flops. And, fortunately for Neon, it has also been showered with unadulterated praise claiming it to be this generation’s Silence of the Lambs. Does Perkins’ sleeper hit have what it takes to stack up against those giants in the genre? Or does it fall flat?
What’s it all about?
Longlegs follows Monroe’s character Lee Harker, an FBI agent tasked with solving a decades-long search for a serial killer who leaves cryptic, occultist letters at each murder, whom the film's title is named after. The FBI is stumped since there’s no forensic evidence indicating that a killer even entered the houses where each murder is carried out. In each case, the family’s father commits the crime in a murder-suicide pattern with the letters as the only link to Longlegs. She makes significant progress on the case to the point where she’s able to decode the letters left at the scenes of the crimes, connecting Longlegs’s motives to satanism. She discovers that he targets families with nine-year-old daughters whose birthday is 6 days removed from the 14th of any given month, which somehow charts out an upside-down triangle. As Lee progresses through the case, she and her supervisor Agent Carter played by Blair Underwood uncover more sinister, supernatural links to the murders leading to many revelations that undermine Harker’s personal life. The film starts and frames itself as a procedural thriller yet delves into a supernatural territory that’s largely hit or miss.
All that with nothing to show
Much of Perkins’ style and direction has been lauded by most reviews which I feel has been largely misguided. Certainly, the craftsmanship is strong and there is an attention to detail that’s better than most in the horror genre. Perkins makes the effort, but to what effect? So much of the style here is superfluous. The filmmakers try too hard to scare the audience and get under their skin, providing a greater emphasis on atmosphere rather than storytelling. Typically, in the horror or crime genre, the way to engage the audience is by gradually building the tension and catching the audience off guard. Here, they throw the whole kitchen sink at you. Perkins opts to shoot the picture with an extra wide angle lens for the entire runtime, probably on a 15mm or lower. A more subtle filmmaker would save a lens choice like this for scenes with heightened tension or to highlight a character’s paranoia, instead, Perkins keeps this visual language consistent from beginning to end. Much of the visuals grow repetitive and lack direction. For example, the cinematography, while professional and very appealing to the eye, maintains a similar color profile for the entirety of the film. Then, beyond the visual, there’s an especially oppressive sound design at play. At any moment that may indicate something sinister, Perkins blasts the theater with heightened sound effects that take the thrill out of any and every scene. It is the equivalent of blasting sentimental music at any borderline tragic moment. It’s all very on the nose. This goes for the performances as well. Nicolas Cage does nothing new here, merely wearing a pound of makeup and spewing weird noises. Maika Monroe is another misused piece whose character has no personality whatsoever. She’s never given a proper character arc or any kind of trait that makes the audience care for her. It is a cliche that characters need to learn something or change by the end of a film to be good characters, yet Perkins gives her nothing to work with. I gather she becomes more paranoid near the end of the film, but that’s all I can surmise. While there may have been potential for Longlegs to work on a technical level, its failings all lead to the story itself.
Cheap imitation
Hitchcock always said that a mystery is always more dull than suspense. Much of the same can be said about Longlegs, where the only suspense lies in how the murders are committed. Thus, the film never charts any real or emotionally investing trajectory, failing to build to anything important. It’s a film more suitable to a puzzle than a cinematic experience. Much of the foreboding and sinister vibes developed by the film’s repetitive audio and visual style work towards a third act that’s both confounding and irrelevant. What you find out is that most of the film operates in the supernatural and the occult. Two elements of horror rarely land with the exceptions of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, two films that have been relentlessly ripped off. What filmmakers tend to misunderstand about those films is that the tension and suspense lead somewhere emotionally and intellectually satisfying. There’s always something deeper hidden behind the horror mumbo jumbo. Here, there’s no blend of the psychological or spiritual with the supernatural, instead the silly plot machinations only function as a confusing genre gimmick. The plot twist near the end of the film is nothing short of a bad imitation of M. Night Shyamalan. All of this is to say that Longlegs remains a rather vacuous experience with nothing interesting to say.
A Facade
While Oz Perkins’ Longlegs is an admirable effort with a lot of hard work to show for it, it fails to work as a quality film. Granted, its box office success and marketing should be celebrated since all a movie has to do nowadays to make money is throw together a string of cameos to placate the audience. Still, at the end of the day, Longlegs is no Silence of the Lambs. Nor is it an outlier horror film. What it boils down to is schlock horror masquerading as high art.