Longlegs – 3.25 stars
There are very real and unsettling moments of dread and terror in this story about FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) tracking a serial killer in the rural areas of Oregon, circa 1990s. The film is eerie, creepy, and meditatively brooding. It also commendably avoids gore porn and hackneyed, now seemingly obligatory jump scares, while credibly blending the occult with the manhunt. Director Oz Perkins is deft and ingenious with the camera, particularly in flashbacks to various murders. He, or his editor, know how to cut a film.
But … the picture is loaded with plain dumb choices. Perhaps the dumbest being the selection of Nicolas Cage as the serial killer.
I’m not spoiling anything. He appears in the first scene and he is most definitely the serial killer. Ghostly white, screechy voice, clearly deranged, and yet, comfortably ensconced in the same community that has been suffering mass killings for a significant period of time. He’s almost as bad as Pennywise, the clown in It, who lives in a burg where children have a 43% mortality rate. Okay, the FBI can’t really do anything about a supernatural clown that haunts the sewers, though people inexplicably stay in whatever preposterous New England town Stephen King presents (“But honey, the teacher-to-student ratio in Londonderrychester is to die for!”). But a clearly deranged loon who looks like the adult child of Edgar Winter and Phyllis Diller flipping out when he buys supplies at a hardware store that he frequents, and no call to the police? Too much.
The story also relies on a plot device that could work if some care were given. A little bit of a spoiler does follows in this paragraph. The supernatural force controls individuals, and thus they are possessed, for lack of a better word, into doing the Devil’s work. The explanation of how that possession works, is, shall we say, lacking in elucidation (a trusted film correspondent writes, “The silver ball. WTF? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb”). There is also the problem of how the ball is deposited. Better suited to the 1950s and early 60s in terms of getting a foot in the door. Not in Bill Clinton’s America.
There’s also the issue of Agent Harker, who appears to be on the spectrum and whose own tortured background plays heavily into the story. She just doesn’t seem like an FBI agent. She veers between catatonic and stilted, but Monroe can’t imbue any heart. It is critical you care about her fate, but as presented, she’s often just above a mannequin. Worse, other characters (her boss, Blair Underwood and family) are supposed to somehow warm to her, which, given her clear aberrant mien, is asking way too much.
And for a picture that in many ways rejects some of the formula and tropes of the genre, are we really going to put a rookie agent on the floor, poring over spread-out photos and reports as she tackles the conundrum of Phyllis Winter, who practically wears a sash emblazoned with, “Been Killin‘ Families Since the 70s!”?
And light switches. Nobody seems inclined to turn on the lights. That’s Jimmy Carter’s America!
Okay. I’m being hard on a film that ultimately, I recommend. Because the feel and tone and a lot of the choices are right. And it was directed by Anthony Perkins’ son. Who played this guy in Legally Blonde. Which is, like, my favorite movie ever.
filmvetter 
The behavior of all the main characters in this movie was odd. None of them acted like real people. Maika Monroe played Agent Harker, as you put it, “catatonic and stilted”. She never came across as a believable FBI agent, which was a major problem for the film.
But Harker’s mom, played by Alicia Witt, was even more bizarre. Her motivation was stated in the movie, but the exposition didn’t help. Her behavior remained egregious and unexplainable even when a superficially reasonable motive was provided for it. Chalk it up to the supernatural, I suppose.
An unrecognizable Blair Underwood as Harker’s boss, Agent Carter, was also a mystery. While he was typically gruff and uninterested in most details, he would occasionally act with great knowingness – to the point I even suspected him of being involved in the Satanic plot. The scene in which he reveals the potential significance of Harker’s birthday and then asks he to go see her mother for clues just seemed too abrupt for a man who otherwise rushed through most of the investigation. He also brought her onto the case because he sensed she had some special powers that might helped solve it, but then showed little interest in what she did.
The movie’s eerie atmospherics often worked, so it’s a shame that the behavior and motivations of the characters were so flawed. A supernatural film needs to be grounded in some human reality before it can make a dramatic impact, but there was little human reality in this film.
Yup. Everything seemed “off” which was kind of cool when you attributed it to the atmospherics. But you had this canyon between Cage, who is so loony as to be boring, and the rest of the characters, for whom you cared not a whit. I remember caring so much for Clarisse Starling, it was unbearable. But I also cared about the Senator’s daughter, and the Senator, and the poor Memphis cops who Lecter butchered. Boy did I care. Yet, here, while entire families are done in – I don’t care. Even one where we meet the little girl. Nope. And Carter? I felt as anesthetized to her plight as she acted.
And yea, there was a lot of “chalk it up to the supernatural” coated over a lot of pretty wide cracks.
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is a good comparison. So, too, is THE EXORCIST. In that film, the supernatural and satanic is grounded in the reality of 1970s Washington with such fine detail that one can be forgiven for forgetting that the movie isn’t actually about a real family and a real priest.
LONGLEGS wasn’t trying to be like THE EXORCIST. It was going for a much different vibe. But I think it would’ve been a better movie if it had tried to be more like THE EXORCIST.
The Exorcist had everything LongLegs did not in terms of the supernatural: pre-set rules steeped in Catholicism, and a backstory that was revealed beforehand (Father Merrin and Satan had tangled before). It also had intriguing characters going through their own trauma irrespective of the possession of the girl (Father Karras’ guilt and loss of faith, the mother’s divorce) and moments of great tenderness (the mother falling into Father Karras’ arms, the budding friendship between Karras and the detective).
Here, there are no rules, no catechism, not even much lore, just a wacko and unexplained metal beads in a doll. So, it can make it up as it goes along without any fealty to anything.
Moreover, there are some scraps, but LongLegs eventually opts for Shymalanesque “You see!” at the end.
Finally, the characters are wooden and dreary and as you point out, they behave irrationally, so you just don’t care, leaving you nothing but the spooky. That’s asking a lot of spooky.
Impressive misfire.
Agreed.