Longlegs strides across your nightmare

Osgood Perkins' Longlegs is a near masterpiece. Yes, in summary it sounds like a Silence of the Lambs riff/homage/rip-off, but it's far different. If anything, it's very much more of what Demme's film would be if David Lynch directed instead. That might feel reductive and unfair to Perkins who is proving himself to be a singular voice in the psychological or just plain horror genre, but it's really not.

Lynch's influence has pervaded a couple of generations of filmmakers by now and while it's fun to play "spot the Lynch", it's more useful to see how that influence is repurposed and reinvented. Here, Perkins pulls away from the mostly visual impact of Lynch's work and opts for working with sound design to set the tone the movie overall. 

I don't see anything in sound desinger Eugenio Battaglia's filmography that points to much that could be shared with Lynchian sonics, so I'm assuming that Perkins had very specific ideas about developing the aural environment throughout.

Visually, the film is unique. There are long, lingering shots - wide, long, and close - that hold for just enough time to evoke discomfort that underscores Maika Monroe's special FBI agent Lee Harker's discomfort. Double the whammy, if you will. 

Andres Arochi's camera, if anything, is as painterly as, say, John Alcott's work for Barry Lyndon. The palette is not as varied - we seem to be in a twilight world here - but each shot is so carefully composed and supports each sequence. Between the visuals and the sound design, the uneasiness and dread is sustained at a subtle level throughout and this serves to render the more ghastly moments more effective. Another comparison - and not at all odious - and more apt than Alcott, would be Darius Khondji's work for David Fincher on Se7en; Arochi's colors are similarly muted but for a slightly different purpose. Sure, broadly his toned-down cinematography evokes an off-kilter sense of things, but it is also used to contrast markedly with brighter colors when and as they appear. I have in mind instances such as when a child is wearing bright red against a gray to gray-white background. 

Scenes of domesticity also feel as though they harbor an evil lurking just below the surface, one that has been lying in wait for an extensive period and is just ready to manifest. Which, in some ways, is very much the point.

In brief, Longlegs is the name of a suspect in a series of unsolved murders spanning 30 years. Each case is of a murder/suicide but at each crime scene is found a message written in a made-up language. Were it not for the note, the feds would have likely not taken too much notice of the crimes; a family with no known issues is slaughtered by the father, who then offs himself. Of course, that pattern would be noticed within a geographical area, but it's likely to be dismissed owing to coincidence or who knows, maybe environmental causes?

Along comes Harker who, on a door-to-door, intuits that a perp she and her partner are looking for is in a specific house. She says they should call for back-up and he demurs, saying he's not going to waste resources on a hunch. He approaches the front door and is promptly shot in the forehead. Dead as a, well, doornail.

Harker arrests the perp in a house with no furniture, where walls are covered by plastic sheets giving Harker's advance through the hallways and up the stairs a particularly dreamlike quality. Soon thereafter, we see her in a darkened room undergoing a psych (or better, parapsych) test and being put on the Longlegs case.

We may think we've found ourselves in full-on Twin Peaks territory and we wouldn't be wrong. But again, Perkins subverts that text by playing it far straighter. Blair Underwood plays Harker's superior Agent Carter straighter and with a number of nuances that play up Harker's oddity. 

Monroe plays Harker with an almost alien sensibility except that it the aura of strangeness and trauma that pervades the film surrounds her performance like a cocoon. At times, I almost felt like the weirdness in the film was emanating from her, but if so, it runs up against the equally pervasive nature of Longlegs himself.

A lot has been said about Nic Cage's work in this film and it's all true. He's only on screen for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes (at most) but he's present throughout. I haven't quite determined for myself what the Marc Bolan dimension of this is, except that Longlegs does seem like a desiccated glam rock god. But he's far more unsettling than that. Think of Robert Blake's Mystery Man in Lost Highway, but given more screen time and more unhinged and this approximates what Perkins and Cage are doing here. 

Much has also been said about how unrecognizable Cage is under the prosthetics, but I don't see it; it's Nic Cage, all right, but he makes himself unrecognizable by what he brings to the role. No, he's not present at the murders, but he's responsible for them. He knows Harker's after him and there's so, so much more I cannot say without deep-sixing this film for anyone reading it. Maybe in a year or two, I'll revisit it and go into greater detail, but suffice it to say, it's a clever conceit and the most unsettling - yes, that word again - aspect of the film.

Perkins' script is an almost perfect textbook for how to write a film like this. The film unfolds scene by scene as a genuine waking nightmare and culminates in a finale that might just match the big reveal in Fincher's opus mentioned above. 

So what keeps me from going full hyperbole on this? Weeeeellll, there's a bit of exposition that kills all the dread that's been built up. Ambiguity vanishes and with it, the sense of imbalance that lent that sense of everything being slightly "off" throughout. I honestly think this is a near-perfect film of its kind and I also feels it stumbles in the last act. 

Consequently, despite the number of critics who have said how much this film sticks with them long after the film is over, I just don't feel that way. I realize two things about that. One, I've just seen too many similar works; there's a good chance that if I were in my 20s, this would have rocked my world. It wouldn't be out of place on a double bill with a Lynch or a Fincher were this the 80s or 90s, but by now, it's just too hard for me to be drawn in as completely as in my yout'. This is much more about me than, of course, the film. Your mileage is likely to vary. 

The second reason is the aforementioned exposition. Too much being said negates the visceral impact the film has built up. But I have a caveat to my caveat.

You should see this movie. It is unlike anything else out right now; it does mostly stick the landing and it does grapple with the nature of evil, trauma, and the harm we do to those we want to protect. I really wish I could say more, but i want to preserve the purity of this film's narrative as much as possible.

And yes, Monroe and Cage deliver two of the finest performances on the big screen available right now. She's burdened with the heavier, more granular role, but Cage...Jesus...yeah, go see it. Just go see it.