Longlegs

Maika Monroe

Oz (or Osgood) Perkins has garnered respectable critical kudos and the highest American gross ever for Neon pictures with his serial killer saga Longlegs. I was non-plussed. As I've written before, Perkins has a gift for evoking dread from the negative space of his settings be they roaring furnaces, bulletin boards or kitchen walls. As for plot and multi-dimensional characters, I am still waiting. A winning actor, Perkins can command top talent now that he has risen up the Hollywood food chain as a director: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood, and Kiernan Shipka do what they can to enliven the morbid spectacle that is Longlegs, but to no avail.

The film strikes me, on one level, as a The Silence of the Lambs retread with Ms. Monroe as a more intuitive and tentative FBI Agent and Cage as your basic satanic killer clown, the self-proclaimed Longlegs. Unfortunately, neither Longlegs nor Agent Harker (!) are as memorable as Clarice or Hannibal Lecter or even Buffalo Bill. Giving Mr. Perkins a benefit of doubt, I think he is trying to express his feeling towards a legacy of family secrets and trauma. However, the characters he creates are stick figures, most crucially the mother of Agent Harker (played by Ms. Witt) and keeper of family secrets. Mrs. Harker is your run of the mill nutty Christian fundamentalist constantly telling her daughter to say her prayers, Sigh. It is telling that the only film of Mr. Perkins that I would recommend is the least original, Gretel and Hansel.