WSB x Moving Picture Review: Longlegs
It’s been awhile since we’ve had a good police procedural horror film. Granted, it’s a tall task to expect anyone to emerge from the towering shadows of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and David Fincher’s Se7en (1995)—and quite a few have tried (see Spiral: From the Book of Saw, for instance)—but it’s precisely those films’ successes that Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Gretel & Hansel) aims to replicate with Longlegs (2024).
Longlegs isn’t shy about its influences. FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is practically a dead ringer for Clarice Starling, and Perkins flat out admits in an interview with Rue Morgue that, “the set-up for Longlegs is so Silence of the Lambs that it’s almost a joke.” Despite this, Perkins’s film manages to confidently tread its own path, turning the cat-and-mouse thriller into a bonafide supernatural nightmare.
Monroe’s (It Follows, The Watcher) Agent Harker is a more timid investigator than her Silence of the Lambs counterpart, relying more on a preternatural intuition than her training and interrogation skills. But it’s that same intuition that gets her noticed by agents Carter and Browning (Blair Underwood and Michelle Choi-Lee, respectively), landing her a spot on the team investigating the all-but-cold search for the killer who calls himself Longlegs—a figure who slays entire families on or around their daughter’s birthday, and whose sole physical evidence tying him to his crime scenes are the signed notes he leaves.
The film feels like a departure for Perkins; his prior films all bearing a quiet patience to their pacing—a softness that works especially well with the isolating atmospheres he’s become known for. Here, however, the pace is frenetic by comparison, opening first on a spine-tingling encounter with the titular villain, followed by an intense introduction to Harker’s abilities during a routine canvassing operation.
If you’re expecting Longlegs to follow the formula of its spiritual predecessors, though, you may come out disappointed. Due, in part, to its quickened pace, Longlegs more or less abandons the scenes of poring over evidence or the drawn out examinations of grisly crime scenes. These are still present to some extent, but the focus leans much more into the dark rabbit hole that is pulling Harker ever closer to the center of the Longlegs murders.
That said, when you break free from the expectations that the film’s set-up might guide you into, Longlegs stands tall as its own disturbing beast. When you finally meet Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs, for instance, you’ll be immediately dispelled of all allusions to the cold, calculated machinations of Hannibal Lecter or Se7en’s John Doe. Longlegs is a lunatic—the kind of unhinged that might be silly if it weren’t so clear how zealously he believes in his own cause. He is dangerous, not because of his genius plans or his meticulously laid traps, but because of how singular his drive is to accomplish his goals.
Perkins’s story, straightforward as it appears, is one that will undeniably bear fruit with repeated screenings. With dark figures lurking in the background of pivotal scenes, a puzzling emphasis on the letter S, and a disconcerting use of the color white, there is plenty in Longlegs to keep fans exploring. From the pallid complexion of Harker’s shut-in mother to the stark, white-washed facades of so many of the homes and buildings in the film, and especially the makeup caked loosely on Longlegs’s face, the color takes on a more oppressive role than the clarity or purity that’s more commonly reserved for it. It is the cinematic feature that continues to haunt my ideas about the film as a whole and will undoubtedly bring me back to it. These are the exciting elements that upend our expectations and make Longlegs unique in its class.
Bolstered by Neon’s brilliantly cryptic viral marketing campaign that may prove too successful, Longlegs enters theaters with more pre-release buzz than any other horror film this year. It’s a buzz that’s teetering dangerously close to overhype, guaranteeing that some will exit feeling let down. But please don’t let that dissuade you from seeing it. As plainly as Longlegs wears its inspiration on its sleeves, it carves its own grooves into the crime thriller genre. It’s the kind of film that has the potential to spawn its own microgenre of occult-tinted procedurals, which I, for one, would welcome with open arms.
WSB x Moving Picture Reviews is sponsored by the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Festival. The Pittsburgh Moving Picture Festival celebrates both the art of cinema and the rich motion picture exhibition tradition of the City of Pittsburgh. Our goal in this series is to highlight new and upcoming genre films and, wherever possible, to support local, independent movie theaters in the process.
Article Written by Ande Thomas
Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He is an independent member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.
