Don’t call it a comeback. Satan has been here for years, though truth be told, he’s been slacking of late, preferring to chill in the background rather than do the work necessary to bring evil — or its reasonable equivalent — into the world. Most likely, though, that’s because Satan realizes that he doesn’t have to do much, if anything, at all, to get what he wants. He can just let humankind do what they (we) do, sit back on his favorite faux-leather recliner, and just wait for the results (i.e., the damned souls of the recently departed) to pour and/or roll in.
Satan doesn’t exist in the real world except as a mythological-religious construct, but at least in fiction and on film, he’s rarely offscreen or off-page for too long. Just this year, he’s made a strong comeback, playing a key, high-profile role in Late Night with the Devil, The First Omen, and Immaculate (among others, certainly). And before anyone could say, “I miss Satan,” he returned, albeit in non-corporeal, malevolent form (his favorite form, apparently) in Osgood “Oz” Perkins’ (Gretel & Hansel, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, The Blackcoat’s Daughter) latest contribution to the horror genre, Longlegs, a supremely bleak, borderline nihilistic, supernatural thriller.
While Satan prefers to hang back in the shadows literally and figuratively, letting his earthly representative, Nicolas Cage’s scraggly, denim-wearing, plastic surgery-obsessed character, Dale Kobble (aka, Longlegs), do his blood-stained bidding, he remains an evil, malevolent presence, everywhere and nowhere at once. With his freakish appearance, high-pitched voice, and bizarre mannerisms, he’s the opposite of what passes as normal – or more accurately, “normal-presenting” – serial killer (i.e., the kind that anonymously blends into the general population).
Cage’s performance as Longlegs represents a significant risk for Cage and, by extension, Perkins: He’s either immediately perceived as a wildly comical figure, a figure for ridicule or even fun, or a deeply disturbing, terrifying one. To borrow a phrase more than applicable here: Your mileage may vary, but it’s a make-it-or-break-it moment when Cage’s unhinged, Tiny Tim-inspired serial killer makes his first appearance in Longlegs, a charmless, intrusive intruder at an isolated, wintry family farm, his pale, make-up-covered face half-obscured by Perkins’s child-centered camera.
Shot like an unmotivated home movie beamed directly from a demonic dimension to the audience’s occipital lobes, the opening scene reveals a tenuous connection between Longlegs, a serial killer operating unencumbered for two decades in the Pacific Northwest, and Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, Watcher, It Follows, The Guest), a newly minted FBI agent whose lone encounter with Longlegs as a young girl left her traumatized with a capital “T” (a given in modern horror). The experience also left Lee with a seemingly undiagnosed case of PTSD and a minor touch of extrasensory perception (i.e., clairvoyance). She can’t see into the future, at least not with any clarity, but her powers of intuition, specifically her ability to solve seemingly unsolvable puzzles, make her unique among her fellow FBI agents.
At least that’s what we’re expected to believe about Lee and the FBI’s decades-long inability to find Longlegs or stop his slow-motion rampage, presumably because he doesn’t kill his victims outright or leave any clues about his identity behind, but instead somehow convinces seemingly stable, suburban families to commit murder-suicide, a pattern that typically involves a married couple, their tween daughter, and a mid-month birthday. After he’s finished with the family, he leaves a different card tucked inside an envelope each time. The card contains a cryptic, Zodiac-style message, one for each murder-suicide. Despite their best efforts, the FBI remains at a standstill, incapable of decoding Longlegs’ messages. Until Lee, fresh from FBI school and her first assignment in the field, enters the picture, of course.
Longlegs draws inspiration from Manhunter, Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, and every derivative serial-killer thriller since, not to mention creepy doll-themed flicks released over the last half-century (far too numerous to list here). Perkins not-so-gently tweaks familiar genre tropes, adding a thick, suffocating, miasmic layer of the supernatural (specifically Satanism and the panic thereof that proliferated between the 1970s and the 1990s), and drops a dedicated, if emotionally unprepared, FBI newbie (Lee) into the mix. That Longlegs mostly works in delivering its share of sustained, low-intensity dread owes more to Perkins’s practiced ability to create and maintain a grim, despondent mood from the first, murky scene of Lee’s discomfiting encounter with Longlegs as a preteen to its last, deliberately enigmatic shot.
That it sometimes fails to work owes a great deal to Cage’s divisive central performance (the less we see of Longlegs as a character, the better the lingering, disquieting effect), illogical story turns explained by vague references to magic or the supernatural, and a surface-deep, Satanic-oriented mystery that repeatedly relies on supposedly smart, self-aware characters inorganically shedding their respective IQs to meet the demands of Longlegs’ increasingly convoluted plot.
Longlegs is now available to rent or buy via VOD.
