Given how cinema is engulfed within the so-called Easter egg tradition, it’s tempting to over-read the presence of glam-rock signifiers in Oz Perkins’s Longlegs. T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” serves as each its epigraph and shutting credit accompaniment. And an album cowl of Lou Reed’s Transformer seems prominently above the eponymous menace’s mirror. However glam rock gives much less of a skeleton key to the movie than a information on how you can watch it.
The flamboyant early-Nineteen Seventies subgenre of rock music, which sought to upend rock’s hegemonic hypermasculinity with androgyny and gender fluidity, was a promise of liberation to its followers. How one thing begins its life isn’t the way it should all the time current itself. So additionally goes Longlegs, a sturdily constructed horror movie with a basis sneakily constructed on shifting sands.
Perkins instantly harkens again to acquainted ’90s horror thrillers, as if making an attempt to place the viewers as ease. For one, the movie’s shamelessly cribs from The Silence of the Lambs. Like Clarice Starling, Perkins’s protagonist, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), is a uncommon feminine F.B.I. agent at a time when males dominated the bureau. And because the story progresses, she additionally appears to share an unlikely connection, if not a reluctant kinship, with a serial killer wreaking havoc.
However Lee doesn’t have the posh of beginning along with her tormentor, the prison mastermind Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) tied to a string of house murders, behind bars. Her boss (Blair Underwood) duties her with decoding a collection of the fugitive’s cryptic messages left on the scenes of grisly murder-suicides in Pacific Northwest household houses. These ominous notes recall the crime scene leave-behind notes of David Fincher’s 1995 breakout Se7en, they usually include written ciphers that additionally harken again to Fincher’s later Zodiac. “I’m telling you,” a skeptical fellow agent speculates about Lee’s acumen, “she’s not prepared for this.” She disproves her doubters, nevertheless, however not solely as a result of she possesses preternatural investigative expertise.
Lee has a sinking sense that Longlegs selected her to unravel his case. Cracking his symbolic language is much less the reply to a riddle than the doorway to a psychological maze, one wherein Lee should face down lingering tensions from her previous. The path to cracking the case runs via her pious mom, Ruth (Alicia Witt). Lee maintains a well mannered détente with Ruth over the spiritual strictures she’s deserted since leaving house. However the more and more non secular and occult overtones of the killings necessitate a deeper re-engagement along with her mom’s beliefs.
It’s right here that Perkins rises above merely paying homage to the aforementioned ’90s horror movies and channels one other one to which he’s extra not directly indebted: M. Night time Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. The twist in Longlegs, although, exists extra at a thematic degree than as a plot level. Perkins slowly and slyly adjusts the stakes of the movie till they turn into unmistakably totally different from the place they started. Just like the slaughters of complete households that Longlegs precipitates, these occasions strike with such shock as a result of they appear to originate from a foundation of shared belief.
This storytelling alternative works as a result of it places the viewers in the identical headspace as Lee, compelled to rethink previous observations and postulations based mostly on newly gained information of their sinister undercurrents. It additionally offers a story analog to Perkins’s place outdoors the movie. He’s somebody who appears to be a benevolent information via a complicated and sometimes scary world. However he’s not above utilizing that highly effective perch to control and deceive.
The draw back of this determination is that Longlegs turns into too usually outlined by what it’s not. The movie fortunately sidesteps the present pattern of “metaphorror,” wherein the monster proves to be little greater than a manifestation of the protagonist’s deep-seated trauma. However Perkins additionally misses an opportunity to extra forcefully talk what Longlegs is by itself phrases. On a regular basis spent defying conventions by no means leads to rewriting any of them.
That slight empty feeling, although, solely units in after Longlegs concludes. Perkins deploys Monroe like a precision device to amplify the creeping dread inside his sparsely populated frames. Her ceaselessly inscrutable expressions serve a twin goal, standing in for the viewers whereas hinting at suppressed sensations able to spill over at any second. Monroe, like Perkins, delivers work that’s constantly riveting however solely sporadically revelatory.
Rating:
Solid: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby, Lauren Acala, Kiernan Shipka, Maila Hosie, Jason Day, Lisa Chandler, Ava Kelders, Rryla McIntosh Director: Oz Perkins Screenwriter: Oz Perkins Distributor: Neon Operating Time: 101 min Score: R Yr: 2024
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