Director – Oz Perkins – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 101m
*****
An FBI hunt for a serial killer becomes embroiled in occult and Satanic practices, and the past history of the FBI agent involved – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 12th
There’s a peculiar flashback, denoted by a 4:3 rounded-edge frame within the wider letterboxed image, at the start of Longlegs involving a young girl (Lauren Acala) who comes out of her family house and a mysterious, white-feminine-haired stranger (Nicolas Cage) who explains the mystery of his arrival with the phrase, “I’ve got my long legs on today”, an indelible apparition and images that conjure fairy tales and nightmares. Although Cage isn’t on the screen all that much, when he intermittently appears, he delivers one of his most arresting performances in years.
The protagonist, who is onscreen pretty much all the time, is FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) who, with her FBI partner, has been charged with the job of investigating serial killer Longlegs. When early on she accurately picks out a house where he’s hiding with apparent ease, her psychic abilities are revealed to the Bureau and her FBI boss Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), changing the course of the Bureau’s investigations.
Loosely speaking, this follows the template of the FBI procedural, the manhunt. However, as they’re watching, things happen all the time to disrupt your expectations.
Agent Harker is confronted with the Bureau’s records of murders committed by Longlegs, and starts to discern patterns which may be clues as both to why he’s doing what he’s doing and on what date(s) he’s next likely to commit another atrocity. Patterns and puzzles, order and chaos. The viewer just thinks they’re beginning to get your head around what they’re watching when, suddenly, wham!, something violent happens in front of them to make them reassess where they thought they were. You thought you were getting somewhere, but you were wrong. Welcome to the Cinema of Disorientation.
Lee Harker’s mother (Alicia Witt) also puts in an appearance. Whatever your expectations for the role of a mother might be in this scenario, you’re very likely wrong about that too. Director Perkins has the rare ability to pull rabbits (and far darker things) out of his hat when you least expect.
Parts are painfully, almost unendurably slow, but so compelling that you can’t take your eyes off the screen. There are many genuinely upsetting moments or scenes, while the whole proves an undeniably tough watch, so much so that one part of this reviewer would go back and watch it again to try and make some sense of it and another part wouldn’t want to go back and repeat the experience. One’s reaction is nothing if not straightforward.
Its sensibilities at times reminded me a little of David Lynch, perhaps it’s the way he builds or lights environments with patches of bleak, earthy colour and impenetrable areas of darkness. And yet you can’t pigeonhole the piece as sub-Lynch: Oz Perkins is very much his own person, and the film (the first of his I’ve seen) presages a unique voice. And Nicolas Cage here is nothing like he was in his one Lynch performance in Wild At Heart (1990); as it traverses its dark environments, the film is closer to Blue Velvet (1986).
The phrase “not for the faint-hearted” applies. That phrase may be a cliché, but this film most definitely is not. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if, a decade or so on, it hadn’t spawned a plethora of copycat movies.
Longlegs is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, July 12th.
#Longlegs @BlackBearUK
Trailer: