Longlegs (2024)
Directed by Osgood Perkins
FBI Agent Lee Harker is a gifted new recruit assigned to the unsolved case of an elusive serial killer. As the case takes complex turns, unearthing evidence of the occult, Harker discovers a personal connection to the merciless killer and must race against time to stop him before he claims the lives of another innocent family.
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Osgood Perkins further evolves the dark aesthetic of his previous features, and while his script will quickly draw comparisons to The Silence Of The Lambs (with a bit of a push provided by the period setting), the narrative is matched it with a green, brown, and grey-heavy pallet reminiscent of David Fincher’s work and evokes connections to Zodiac and the series Mindhunter.
Her boss (Blair Underwood) tasks her with decoding a series of the fugitive’s cryptic messages left at the scenes of grisly murder-suicides in Pacific Northwest family homes. These ominous notes recall the crime scene leave-behind notes of David Fincher’s 1995 breakout Se7en, and they contain written ciphers that also harken back to Fincher’s later Zodiac. “I’m telling you,” a skeptical fellow agent speculates about Lee’s acumen, “she’s not ready for this.”
Scenes and themes feel lifted in spirit from bigger, meatier thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Zodiac (2007) — it’s the 90s, and Lee is surrounded by taller male agents, and one early sequence sees her moving with a near-panicked intensity through a killer’s lair.
Although the presence of Longlegs at any of these brutal killings cannot be proven, mysterious letters reminiscent of the ones in David Fincher’s Zodiac are left as a sort of signature at each scene.
For anyone who has seen a handful of notable works in the thriller or horror genre, such as David Fincher’s Zodiac, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure or the aforementioned The Silence of the Lambs, Perkins’s screenplay will sound somewhat familiar.
I was told it would be like The Silence of the Lambs, or perhaps David Fincher's Zodiac if it had been dragged direct out of Satan's anus, with a performance by Nicolas Cage as a serial killer so traumatising it had to be shielded from the (non-paying) public's eyes.
These ominous notes recall the crime scene leave-behind notes of David Fincher’s 1995 breakout Se7en, and they contain written ciphers that also harken back to Fincher’s later Zodiac.
Oregon's dimmed-down yellow lighting and eerie mistiness are reminiscent of David Fincher's Se7en and Zodiac or Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners.
Although the presence of Longlegs at any of these brutal killings cannot be proven, mysterious letters reminiscent of the ones in David Fincher’s Zodiac are left as a sort of signature at each scene. Longlegs is known to conduct each murder in a systematic way, where the father of a family is seemingly coerced or convinced into killing his own.
Yes, it is easily this decade’s answer to films such as The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, but it is by no means the perfect masterpiece that it has been touted as.
Scenes and themes feel lifted in spirit from bigger, meatier thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Zodiac (2007) — it’s the 90s, and Lee is surrounded by taller male agents, and one early sequence sees her moving with a near-panicked intensity through a killer’s lair.
Longlegs’ premise is reminiscent of The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme's horror drama about a young and underestimated female FBI agent on the hunt for an elusive serial killer. Perkins has been explicit about this connection — and his hope for Longlegs to be in conversation with Demme’s classic — but a morass of other influences makes for a muddy movie.
Comparisons to Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs are justified, and in a just world there would be some buzz around Monroe come awards time.
Obvious comparisons to classic serial killer horror films like Jonathon Demme's The Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher's Se7en are valid up until the film's final act.
For Longlegs to be mentioned in the company of The Silence of the Lambs or Seven is to invite direct comparison, and it is a comparison in which Longlegs inevitably comes out worse for wear.
Writer-director Osgood Perkins’ serial killer chiller fully acknowledges a debt to The Silence of the Lambs in its chronicle of a young female rookie agent pulled into the FBI manhunt for a killer wiping out entire families.
Without spoiling anything, Lee has a connection to the very vampiric Longlegs that made me wonder if Harker was a Bram Stoker's Dracula reference (pretty sure it is).
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It’s here that Perkins rises above merely paying homage to the aforementioned ’90s horror films and channels another one to which he’s more indirectly indebted: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. The twist in Longlegs, though, exists more at a thematic level than as a plot point. Perkins slowly and slyly adjusts the stakes of the film until they become unmistakably different from where they began.
He essentially plays a caricature of an effeminate-serial-killer throwback, à la Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) in The Silence of the Lambs, or Norman Bates in Psycho (the role made famous by the director's father, Anthony Perkins), albeit without the iffy, outdated transgender entanglements — for better or worse.
But Perkins is the son of screen legend Anthony Perkins (aka Norman Bates in Psycho) who led a double life as a closeted queer man; something Perkins’ wife, Berry Berenson naturally hid from her two sons.
Director Osgood Perkins (the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins, making this the second wide-release horror film in as many weeks with a direct connection to Hitchcock’s pioneering masterpiece) has long had an auteurist proclivity for rendering haunting images.
Perkins, a son of the legendary actor Anthony Perkins (best known for playing Norman Bates in Psycho), has made a chain of interesting small-budget efforts over the past decade, including the boarding-school thriller The Blackcoat’s Daughter and the fantasy film Gretel & Hansel.
Perkins, director of the unsettling 2015 horror outing "The Blackcoat's Daughter" as well as 2020's "Gretel & Hansel" (he's also the son of "Psycho" actor Anthony Perkins, which is not insignificant), creates an ominous feeling of terror from the outset and never lets up.
And yet director Osgood Perkins (son of Psycho actor Anthony Perkins) grips us right from the start, stylistically flitting the screen from vintage film-shot 4:3 ratios to a widescreen lens.
That nickname applies to an instantly iconic Nicolas Cage creation, no less disturbing than Max Schreck’s hunchbacked Nosferatu, a performance that has been a career-long inspiration for Cage. Like that early screen vampire, Longlegs puts us on edge with his twisted body language and exaggerated gestures — that, plus odd framing that crops him off at the head, explains how the character manages to worm his way into our brains.
The strategy recalls a banned 1973 teaser for The Exorcist: flashing images of a possessed Reagan’s face set to the distorted harmonics of Lalo Schifrin’s hellish and eventually abandoned score.
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Working on a low budget, Perkins’ use of lenses, low angles and queasily naturalistic lighting are reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s earliest films like Shivers and Rabid; there’s a similar feeling, too, that nothing is taboo or off the table.
Not that Longlegs is really Cage’s film, or Monroe’s or even Alicia Witt’s, who’s hypnotic as the most devoutly religious mother this side of Piper Laurie in Carrie. Rather, this is a showcase for Perkins’ ability to create an entire world out of a few limited locations and cluttered interiors. Audiences’ mileage may vary with the direction Perkins takes the story in its latter stages – this writer preferred the slow burn of Harker following clues of the first half – but Longlegs is nevertheless a icily effective piece of genre filmmaking.