Longlegs ★★★★
TALK about weight of expectation.
Your father created one of the greatest horror villains of all time and you decide to write and direct horror films.
Osgood Perkins’ dad Anthony played Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho, creating the template for hundreds of disturbed cinematic murderers.
Young Osgood started his Hollywood career as an actor but also wrote and directed three reasonable horror efforts between 2015 and 2020.
Now, in 2024, he has delivered on the promise and given us Longlegs, one of the best horror films of the year to date.
The high-level description would be a supernatural version of Silence of the Lambs with Maika Monroe and Nicholas Cage stepping in for Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins.
That alone has been enough to get audiences along to the film, along with a clever promotional campaign that has kept Cage’s villain largely in the shadows.
In fact, during the initial social media campaign months before the film’s release, Cage’s involvement wasn’t even mentioned.
Unlike The Silence of the Lambs, Longlegs is not going to scoop the major categories at next year’s Oscars; but it will be high on most critics’ lists of Top 10 horror films.
It has also pulled in more than $100 million already.
This is a film that uses dread as a weapon against its audience from the very first sequence, involving a flashback to a small girl’s shock encounter with a mysterious man.
Our own introduction to Longlegs is via the edge of a grainy, square ratio screen…and it’s a genuinely good jump scare.
It is clear from this moment on that the ensuing events are not going to end well for anyone involved.
We then jump 20 years to Oregon in the 1990s where FBI agent Lee Harker is assigned to an active case involving a series of murder-suicides over several years.
On each occasion, a father has killed his family and then himself, leaving behind no apparent motive except a cryptic letter signed by somebody called Longlegs.
Lee has an uncanny, almost psychic, ability to get into the mind of a killer and discovers there are satanic aspects to the letters and a person who appears able to convince strangers to commit murder.
The investigation leads Lee down paths that may involve her on a more personal level.
All through this time we are given small glimpses of Cage’s bizarre characters, leading up to a horrid confrontation.
The final acts leans heavily into the supernatural elements, perhaps too much for some viewers, but it’s hard to see any other direction there could have been.
The best, serious horror requires absolute commitment to character to ensure the audience is prepared to suspend disbelief and care about the outcome.
In Longlegs we have Maika Monroe giving probably her best performance to date as Harper, Cage in blistering form and Blair Underwood as one of Lee’s superiors.
Watched at the cinema.