Although the horror film genre has long seen new entries arriving with an avalanche of hype promoting themselves as the most terrifying/daring/gruesome thing ever made in the hopes of luring fans out in the hopes that, maybe this time, the film in question will live up to all the hoopla. In recent years, that promotional approach has, thanks to the advent of social media, exploded to such a degree that some films are now deemed as unassailable masterpieces before they even hit theaters, mostly by influencers and fanboys hoping to be a part of the next big thing. The latest film to get such treatment is Longlegs, the latest work from writer-director Osgood Perkins, which has been cannily marketed over the last few months via oblique trailers hinting at unparalleled nastiness, a slew of advance screenings aimed largely at genre fans who will hopefully spread the good word (while subtly bragging about how they got to see it early) and, of course, the promise of the latest in a seemingly unending string of unhinged performances by Nicolas Cage.
While Cage has been the focus of much of the hype, the film itself, set sometime is centered around Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a new FBI recruit whose first day on the job finds her demonstrating investigative skills bordering on the psychic that allow her to capture a killer despite no seemingly obvious clues (though not enough to do her hapless partner much good). This inspires her superior officer, Agt. Carter (Blair Underwood), to promote her to a task force charged with investigating a string of murders in the Pacific Northwest that has vexed the bureau for years in which entire families have been butchered, evidently by the fathers themselves. In each of the ten known cases, no evidence of outside interference has been uncovered other than letters written in an indecipherable code outside of the signature “Longlegs.”
While sifting through the case files and photos, Lee realizes that in each case, the slaughtered families have included daughters with birthdays on the 14th day of the month—this is the kind of detail that you might think would have been noticed at some point earlier in the investigation, but never mind. The investigation eventually leads Lee and Carter to the location of a similar murder from 1966, where they find a hidden piece of evidence that leads them to the only survivor of that killing (Kiernan Shipka), who is currently residing in a psychiatric institution and who tells a story suggesting that Longlegs is a devil worshipper and the maker of creepy-ass dolls (you can decide for yourself which is more frightening). Of course, there are certain things that Lee neglects to mention to Carter—stuff like the mysterious appearance of a note, seemingly from Longlegs, that allows her to crack the code, the fact that her own birthday falls on the 14th and that she herself may have encountered Longlegs long ago on the eve of her 9th birthday.
Longlegs is, of course, played by Cage, and the film tries to build up some degree of suspense by keeping viewers from getting a real fix on him for roughly the first half, allowing us to hear his weird, high-pitched sing-song voice but either showing him from behind or, as in that aforementioned prologue, framing him in such a way that he is shown only from the neck down. It is an intriguing gambit—trying to develop his theoretically unspeakable menace by keeping him off-screen for as long as possible in the same way that Steven Spielberg handled the shark in Jaws. Of course, when that shark finally made its appearance, it was one of the most terrifying moments in screen history and one that retains its impact no matter how many times you see it. By comparison, the revelation of Longlegs in all his glory turns out to be mostly anti-climactic, unless seeing Cage under a combination of prosthetics, stringy wig and slathered-on white makeup that makes him vaguely resemble Leatherface dressing up as Carol Channing for Halloween is you idea of raw terror. Cage certainly throws himself into the part with his usual gusto but outside of the one scene between Longlegs and Lee, it is a turn that will no doubt live on in YouTube highlight reels but not, as the film clearly hopes, in the dark recesses of your mind.
Over the course of his three previous films—The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Gretel & Hansel—Osgood Perkins has shown himself to be a filmmakers who is uncommonly good at evoking an atmosphere of fear and dread but somewhat lacking when it comes to devising narratives that are able to take advantage of that gift. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the one film of his that I think completely succeeds, Gretel & Hansel, is the one that he did not write.) This time around, he has devised a screenplay that owes a considerable debt to such films as Silence of the Lambs, Seven and their respective imitators, but doesn’t seem to have any real understanding of what it was that made those films so gripping to watch. For starters, the character of Lee is so inert throughout that it is hard to work up any real interest in her—the usually compelling Monroe gives it her all but even she cannot quite figure out how to make her anything other than a B-squad Clarice Starling. A bigger problem is that the screenplay at times feels pretty lazy and contrived for its own good—certain elements (such as the makeup of those dolls and their power) are introduced but never properly explained, Lee’s possible connection to Longlegs feels like a cheat and the whole last half-hour (in which most is revealed as things build to the possible finale slaughter) just goes completely off the rails as people begin acting like idiots in order to keep things moving along.
To be fair, there are moments here and there that do work on some level. The early scenes showing Lee’s relationship to her estranged mother, a heavily medicated recluse living in a childhood home crammed to the rafters with the detritus of a lifetime, are pretty good and give the often-underutilized Alicia Witt a chance to shine as the zonked-out mom who may know more than she is letting on. Likewise, the aforementioned scenes involving the lone survivor of that first killing and the big confrontation between Lee and Longlegs are effective. There is also a neat scene set in a hardware store between Longlegs and a girl that at first primes the audience to dread something truly dreadful happening only to pivot in a way that inspires the film’s biggest laugh. As a promotional campaign, Longlegs is an undeniable success in practically every imaginable way. As a movie, however, it is considerably less successful, proving to be little more than an undeniably stylish but ultimately disappointingly inert compendium of elements cribbed from other, better horror films that never manages to come into its own.