The devil’s in the details. For Oz Perkins’ Longlegs, evil is an intricately designed code and this is a detective story where the serial killer may be dear old Satan himself. The benefactor of Neon’s sublime advertising campaign, which withheld the ghoulish visage of Nicolas Cage’s titular Longlegs, as the twisty, tortured narrative is deciphered, the horror escalates, always building, every small detail paying off in a big way. Longlegs is expertly crafted horror storytelling which belongs to and enhances the genre to which it belongs.
This all starts with the terrific choice to tell a David Fincher-styled crime story, like Seven (1995), Zodiac (2007), or Mindhunter (2017), except in all the places these movies are thrillers, Oz Perkins inserts horror. This is deeply effective, as horror and thrillers have always existed along this spectrum, and this is simply a movie hammering in the genre nail that Silence of the Lambs (1991) once set in place, where investigating the psychology of a real monster is horrifying, but the movie can still run like an efficient detective paperback novel. Also like Silence of the Lambs, this is a horror movie that you can imagine being an awards play, the above-the-line cast and crew may all be viable.
We have a model much like Hannibal and Clarice in Longlegs and Agent Lee Harker. As in the 2014 horror movies The Guest and It Follows, Maika Monroe is a horror natural, arriving ten years later with Lee Harker, one of those great and tragically flawed detectives who belong to cinema. The interplay between agent and killer is interesting and they share a past that may be at the root of all this killing.
The mystery is a tough one to crack. The evident killer never seems to be in the room with the victims. Young girls, on their ninth birthdays, seem to go missing, along with their families. It’s a cold case, but Lee Harker is about to find out the deep, dark nightmare hiding just below the surface. She’s about to meet Mr. Downstairs.
Blending past and present, memories are presented in 4:3, with a claustrophobic little box playing back old traumas that are grainy and shot in 16mm, to divide them from the widescreen present reality. The cinematography of Andrés Arochi Tinajero often shoots through and around objects — we watch from behind doorways, windows, the objects just out of sight, and the feeling is that something is peering back at us, that Longlegs, perhaps, is watching us.
The next trick of the film is that, like the marketing, it withholds Longlegs for about as long as he can. We get a flashback glimpse of him meeting Lee Harker as a child then nothing until the ultra-creepy reveal. His face is caked with white powder and makeup, badly applied lipstick, and floppy hair, he looks and sounds deranged, and as we find out, he’s a creepy doll maker and a worshipper of Satan, if he is not Satan incarnated. His creepy intonations lilt between mock sing-songy predatory lightness to haunting and cruel. When he sings Happy Birthday, the song has never sounded less Happy. When he speaks, you hear a lifetime of neglect and hysteria broiling right below the surface. You see and hear danger right away, and Nicolas Cage sells all of this with frightening precision. Longlegs is a cinematic nightmare, an occult figure risen from Hell to inflect spiritual warfare upon the world.
The movie is well-paced, if not a story of two parts. The detective side of the story slides into accessible convention, again, like a David Fincher movie, which is a lot like all the detective movies since he defined the look and feel of those. And then there’s the new model of horror there to meet it. Somewhere in this combination something entirely new and striking is found. Longlegs feels like a new horror concept in a way that most horror does not get to feel so original. Oz Perkins can add Longlegs to the top of his resume, creating new horror figures worthy of his father, Anthony Perkins’ work in Psycho (1960). Expect imitations, because new ground has been broken and Hell is about to rise up from the cracks and swallow us whole.