In Longlegs, writer-director Oz Perkins establishes a strong enough sense of mood and atmosphere to absorb a DEFCON-2 level Nicolas Cage performance. It helps that Cage only has a handful of scenes as the title character, a ghostly, giggly mystery man who may be behind a series of gruesome murders. Most of our time is spent with FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a fresh-faced agent who is assigned to the case. This makes Longlegs sound like a thriller, but Perkins—who previously directed The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House—steers toward horror, weaving in satanic elements and using slow zooms to infuse each frame with an insinuating, otherworldly dampness (British Columbia stands in for Oregon as a land of dingy, moldy farmhouses). Longlegs also opens with a chilling scare sequence that left me on edge for the rest of the movie. In that scene and elsewhere, Cage goes for broke, wearing an off-white ensemble that complements his pasty face paint. Yet aside from an unfortunate stinger at the movie’s end, he never really hijacks the proceedings. Monroe, who broke out in 2014’s It Follows, gives a riveting performance as Harker. Harker has a sixth sense—her supervisor (Blair Underwood) calls her “half psychic”—that gives her special insight into the Longlegs murders. Wearing an expression that’s somewhere between alarm and catatonia—it’s as if she’s afraid to look around, for fear of what her intuition might suggest to her—Harker doesn’t investigate the case as much as she is possessed by it. That notion, along with Perkins’ assured direction, is enough to distinguish Longlegs from other “obsessed cop” pictures of its kind.
(7/10/2024)
