I certainly admire Perkins’ Longlegs, a loving homage to the serial killer genre.  The movie proudly wears its influences on its sleeve, and those familiar with The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en will have fun identifying all of the ways Perkins references them in this film.  Given the movie’s incorporation of encoded messages, I would include David Fincher’s Zodiac in the mix as well.

The movie begins with a disturbing flashback scene, where young Lee Harker (Lauren Acala) notices a car parked in the driveway of her house with a strange man inside.  (You may recall that Harker is the surname of a character from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)  The man (Nicolas Cage, unrecognizable behind facial prosthetics) suddenly appears and we know that the encounter won’t be a cordial one.  The man is clad in white and has long, stringy white hair.  Curiously, we never see his entire face, only his mouth.  The man appears to be in a manic state, punctuating his words with wild hand gestures.  When he shouts that he wore his long legs today, the scene abruptly cuts to the opening credits and I wondered what the heck just happened.  Never fear, because like the best serial killer movies, it explains everything by the end.

Flash-forward twenty years and Lee (Maika Monroe) is an FBI agent.  Although she is modeled after Jodie Foster’s Clair Starling, Lee’s personality is decidedly different.  Awkward and introverted, she’s the most anxious FBI agent I’ve ever seen on film.  We hear her breathing on the soundtrack whenever she’s in a stressful situation, and it’s a miracle she never passes out from hyperventilating.  Lee and a chauvinistic colleague are asked to canvas a neighborhood for leads on a killer, the old, “Hi!  Have you seen a strange man around?” routine.  With only her intuition, Lee identifies the house where the killer is hiding.  Given that every house looks identical, her colleague ignores her caution and promptly winds up dead.  Lee, scared out of her wits, enters the home and gets the man to surrender without a fight.

Since there was no evidence pointing to that particular house, the FBI performs an incredibly strange series of tests on her to gauge her abilities.  She seems to be highly intuitive, but the movie never follows-up on this angle.  Instead, Lee is put on the Longlegs serial killer case by Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), because he thinks that her ability to connect with serial killers would make her an asset.  The Longlegs case would have made Zodiac’s heart skip a beat.  Longlegs is somehow behind a series of brutal murder-suicies, where the father kills his wife and their daughter using an object within the house, then himself.  Longlegs leaves an encoded message at each crime scene but no physical evidence.  How Longlegs is communicating with the father is a mystery.

Although the case spans decades and presumably has had numerous agents attached to it,  Lee quickly resolves the cipher Longlegs uses and deduces a pattern to his murders.  He has been killing his victims according to a numerical progression, where each murder happens according to the daughter’s age and birth date.  When Lee plots the dates on a grid, they form a satanic inverted triangle.  (The Devil is in the details.)  Thankfully, serial killers aren’t this diabolical in real life or we’d all be in serious trouble.

Awkwardness runs in the Harker family, because Lee’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) is an odd duck.  Lee’s relationship with her is strained for reasons that are eventually made clear.  During a phone call with her mom, Lee spots a dark figure outside her home.  Without calling for backup, Lee rushes outside with her firearm drawn.  Unable to locate the figure, she returns to her home and spots a birthday card on her desk.  It is from Longlegs and includes an encoded message that warns her not to tell anyone about this communication.  If she does, her mom will pay the price.

Eventually, circumstances dictate that Lee tell Carter about that communication, and he believes that she must be connected to Longlegs in some way.  (Of course she is.)  The more Lee learns about Longlegs and the murders, the more she suspects she’s part of it all.  The question is how, and then whether she can identify the victims of Longlegs final murder-suicide in time.  

I admire what Oz Perkins has accomplished with Longlegs.  His deliberate approach reminded me of David Fincher, in how they both design every scene down to the finest detail.  Perkins also adopts David Lynch’s approach to acting, giving his actors the freedom to explore unusual mannerisms and speech patterns.  The movie is also structured and paced much like an episode of Lynch’s Twin Peaks television show:  slow-paced and quirky, with the occasional disturbing image and/or violence interrupting the dreamscape.  As someone who grew up watching the Lynch’s works, I fully appreciated what Perkins was doing.  Others who either aren’t familiar with or don’t appreciate Lynch may grow impatient with Perkins’ decidedly slow boil of a movie, however.

The movie plays like an unholy mashup of The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en.  Maika Monroe’s FBI Agent Lee is a shakier version of Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, and Nicolas Cage’s raging Longlegs is an occult-infused version of Buffalo Bill.  As with John Doe in Se7en, Longlegs is a master of puzzles, although the latter’s end game wasn’t clear to me.  Perkins certainly has an affinity for cerebral killers, and he takes a page from their playbook by steadfastly refusing to tie everything together until a series of shocking encounters at the end.

While I was captivated by Longlegs, I was less enamored with it than the movies that inspired it.  I never connected to the characters at an emotional level.  Some of this was due to Monroe’s performance, which is singular but renders her character as enigmatic and closed off.  Like the movie itself, Monroe’s performance makes sense when all is said and done, but the character pales in comparison to Foster’s or those by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in Se7en.  For his part, Cage brings his outsized theatricality to the role of Longlegs, and those who love watching Cage let it rip won’t be disappointed.  In a career filled with bizarre performances, Cage’s Longlegs is another memorable one.  Even still, I wished there was more to the character than the movie gives us.

Some may accuse Longlegs of being style over substance, and I can sympathize with that viewpoint.  However, given the deliberate and methodical nature of the film, Perkins clearly aspires to something beyond mere aesthetics.  Instead of scaring us, he diverts our attention to the darker side of parenthood, our faith in organized religion and the violence that sometimes inflicts families.  Other aspects of the movie remained obscure to me, like the numerous glam rock references.  For people who like their horror short on terror and long on atmosphere and mood, Longlegs is solid.  It’s a creepy and memorable little concoction that both honors its serial killer inspirations while staking new ground.  Recommended.

Analysis

Director Oz Perkins set Longlegs in the Nineties because of how much The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en influenced him.  In addition to the obvious similarities between Maika Monroe’s Agent Lee and Foster’s Agent Starling, Perkins’ film shares an affinity for the serial-killer-as-diabolical-schemer narrative trope.  As was the case with Lambs and Se7en, Longlegs is a complex equation of a movie that director Perkins solves in real time.  He’s the cinematic equivalent of a mathematics or physics major proving his master’s thesis to his audience.  When the closing credits roll, we’re left to decide whether the equation that Perkins has spent the past two hours scratching out on a blackboard balances out.  When viewed in that light, I would say that everything Perkins has laid out adds up.  All of the inscrutable clues dropped along the way are sufficiently explained by the end.  The remaining question I had was, what is Perkins trying to say with this moody lab session?

From the very beginning, it is evident that Perkins intentionally withheld critical information that would make it possible to discern how everything fits together.  As the movie unfolds, Perkins I kept a mental list of the mysteries that I hoped he would explain before all was said and done.  For example, Lee came face-to-face with Longlegs when she was a child.  What happened after that encounter?  Why is Lee so awkward in her interactions with everyone?  Why do Lee and Ruth have a strained relationship?  How is Longlegs committing his crimes?  Why is Longlegs committing his crimes?  How are Lee and Ruth connected to Longlegs?

At this point, I will assume you have seen the movie and know how Perkins answers all of those questions.  Following is my interpretation: 

During their terrifying encounter with Longlegs, Ruth struck a Faustian bargain with him.  In return for not killing herself and Lee, Ruth would help him carry out his crimes.  She dresses up as a nun and delivers the dolls Longlegs makes to unsuspecting families who believe her line that the doll is a gift from the church.  The dolls contain a metallic sphere through which Longlegs is able to issue commands to the father, ordering him to kill his family and then himself.  Lee was unable to see what Ruth and Longlegs were doing because she was under a spell from her doll.  (This is why she never realized that the base of Longlegs’ operation was in the basement of her home.)  Lee’s stunted personality, another side effect from her doll’s occult spell, isn’t broken until Ruth shoots the doll and ruptures the sphere inside it.  Finally free from the spell, Lee jumps into action and prevents her mother from killing Agent Carter’s daughter.  As an accountant would say, “Check, check and check.”

On this basis, I gladly award Perkins with a diploma from the School of Diabolical Serial Killer Directors.  I consider his movie to be a solid entry in the “mad genius” serial killer movies genre.  What keeps me from describing it as one of the best ever made (Lambs and Se7en) is that the movie lacks what elevated those movies to greatness:  an emotional connection.  Lambs accomplishes this via Foster’s Agent Starling.  Se7en provides us with detectives William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and David Mills (Brad Pitt).  All three of them are personable, sympathetic heroes.  Longlegs, however, lacks a character that we can relate to in that way.

Monroe’s Lee could have been the audience’s surrogate, but Perkins didn’t writte her to serve in that capacity.  Lee is so emotionally closed off that I suspected she was on the Autism spectrum.  It’s only when Ruth shoots the doll that is connected to Lee that Lee seems to emerge from her satanic funk.  While I understood why Lee acted as she did within the larger context of the movie, I struggled relating to a character who shudders during every interaction she has with other people.

The other aspect that prevented me from caring about Lee was that never felt she was in danger.  In the beginning of the movie, when she subdues a killer without a struggle, I felt something was up.  Then, when Longlegs leaves her a birthday card, I knew that Lee would be safe at least until the end of the movie.  Only then would she (and the audience) know what secret part she played in everything that took place.  This is the same plot device used in Se7en, when Kevin Spacey’s John Doe keeps Brad Pitt’s Mills alive so that Mills can bear witness to the culmination of his master plan.

Longlegs never establishes that Lee has anything to lose, either.  In the beginning of Se7en, we are introduced to Mills’ sweet and adorable wife Tracy (played by Gwyneth Paltrow).  As the story unfolded, I hoped that she wouldn’t somehow become a part of Doe’s grisly plans.  In stark contrast, Lee is a loner.  The only person close to her is her kooky mother, who Lee avoids until she’s guilted into a visit.  Because of this, I didn’t care whether Ruth lived or died.  While the movie does offer up Agent Carter and his family as sympathetic characters, we don’t spend enough time with them for their horrific fate to be fully appreciated in the end.  I never worried over whether Lee or anyone around her would die.  Her character is just another quirky piece of the puzzle that Perkins has created.

Another aspect of the movie that kept me at a distance was Perkins’ direction.  I hate to toss around the term “Lynchian” because it’s often used to describe a movie that is weird and strange.  Regardless, I grew up watching Lynch’s films and am very comfortable with a film that takes its own sweet time unveiling what is happening and why.  And while Lynch is noteworthy for his long, drawn-out scenes, the way he edits them is masterful.  Perkins does the same with his movie, but the results were mixed.

Like Lynch, Perkins loves to point his camera at his actors and let them experiment.  While this approach does give the audience an unfiltered view of the character, these scenes went on too long.  Perkins refuses to edit them, leaving them devoid of tension and suspense.  For example, when Lee interviews Carrie Anne Camera, I wondered why we were spending so much time listening to her strange sing-song phrasing.  Shipka’s performance is fine in and of itself, but the scene could have been more engrossing than it was.

This takes me back to my question at the outset: what is Perkins doing in his movie?  While his film plays like he watched Se7en and Lambs on a continuous loop, what he’s created is something decidedly different.  Longlegs may be atmospheric and intriguing, but it isn’t anywhere near as suspenseful or shocking as his influences.  Instead of giving us a relatable hero, we get an emotionally stunted FBI agent.  (I am dubious that anyone who acts like Lee would ever be hired by the Bureau, but that’s another issue entirely.)  Where the movies that influenced him are propulsive and engrossing, his version is slow-paced and chooses to observe things from a safe distance.

Take the scene where the father kills his wife and his daughter.  Perkins shoots the scene in medium and long shots, which makes the violence much less horrific than it could have been.  Later, when Ruth shoots Agent Browning, Perkins curiously diffuses the killing by filming the action from Lee’s perspective inside the house.  I suspect Perkins has gone against genre convention to instead draw our attention to the actual source of evil in the movie: the famiy unit.

In one of the movie’s key flashback scenes, Ruth bemoans to Lee that nobody visits them, not even a big bad wolf.  Ruth obviously should have been more careful for what she wished for, because Longlegs soon shows up with murder on his mind (and a rock & roll in his heart).  Ruth’s offer to help Longlegs in exchange for Lee’s life is the source of everything that happens in the movie.  Ruth’s awful decision to protect her daughter is what leads to all of the subsequent murders.  It isn’t until Lee is in her Thirties that she realizes the evil that her mom aligned herself with.  Perkins seems to be saying that as children, we don’t realize the questionable decisions parents make on their behalf, or how much they are responsible for our messed-up adult lives.  

Then there’s the fact that Longlegs forces fathers to kill their own families.  Is Perkins saying that nice, wholesome families aren’t all that they appear to be?  That horrific violence lurks beneath the surface of every smiling, happy family?  If Perkins was as influenced by David Lynch as I believe he is, then this part of the plot is a direct reference to Twin Peaks.  With Longlegs, Perkins reminds us that horror is not just the realm of clever madmen, but well-meaning parents as well.

Angel Heart

Although the influence of Lambs and Se7en is undeniable, the movie reminded me a lot of the Mickey Rourke-starring Angel Heart.  In that movie, Rourke’s unsympathetic private detective Harry Angel is sent by a mysterious benefactor to look into the disappearance of singer Johnny Favorite.  As Angel comes to learn, Favorite made a deal with the devil to become famous.  However, he then tried to get out of it by performing an occult ritual.  Similar to Longlegs, Angel chases down leads that ultimately reveal that he is Favorite.  Lee’s journey is similar in that she spends the entirety of Longlegs finding out that she was under an occult spell that kept her from seeing that her mother was in league with a serial killer.  I have no idea if Perkins saw Angel Heart, but the similarities between the two were unavoidable to me.

That Old Black Magic

I did admire that Perkins refused to say explicitly how Longlegs was controlling his victims.  He does show us the vehicle:  a metallic sphere lodged within the heads of dolls, but he never explains the black mist inside them.  I assumed it was a satanic spell, which would make sense given how Longlegs is a lifelong devotee of Satan.  But this is just an educated guess.

Get it On

I still don’t get Perkins’ inclusion of the T-Rex song.  Is he using it as a reference to Lee or Ruth?  Maybe Perkins just likes it?  Regardless, if I ever meet Perkins, I would be compelled to ask if he considers the version of “Bang a Gong” by The Power Station to be blasphemy.