Longlegs wins at marketing but fails at being truly scary

In Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, the young hero finds the key to bringing to life a long-dormant automaton designed by cinema’s first magician, Georges Méliès. The image is striking as this humanoid proto-robot holds a pen to paper to write. While we understand that the automaton has no mind of its own, it seems to channel the imagination and passion of its maker. It’s a beautiful symbol for cinema itself: It’s a medium that has the power to make the impossible possible. In the hands of a great artist or magician, cold dead images can find life.

With his latest film, Longlegs, Osgood Perkins seems intent on doing the impossible: giving life to the dead. A pastiche of The Silence of the Lambs and Kurosawa’s Cure with dashes of Psycho and other horror films, Longlegs follows FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), as she assists in investigating a serial killer. It’s not before long that her life becomes deeply intertwined in the strange case.

Longlegs has a beautiful sheen to it. Cinematographer Andrés Arochi uses wide-angle lenses and unusual blocking schemes to invite a sense of unease. Familiar locations, particularly American suburban homes, become slightly distorted. It’s almost as if the houses themselves could breathe as the choice of lens bends and sways them in ways that are not rooted in reality. The film’s colour scheme creates a strong contrast between the slightly dirtied painted panel homes with splashes of deep burgundy and blood reds. It’s a movie that, on the surface, feels considered and weighty. It certainly stands out in the dull homogeneity of most contemporary digital horror looks.

Yet, it’s not long before a creeping dread sets in. No, not the kind promised by the film’s top-tier marketing campaign. Longlegs is not one of the most terrifying films of all time — it’s hardly in the running for the scariest horror film of the year, largely relying on jump scares. The unease stems from a growing feeling that it’s all for naught. The screenplay’s flimsiness and the weight of its ideas rest on the impressions of greater films that came before. Even the filmmaking itself inspires an awkward discord; shots are cut too short and cameras move a little too fast. While horror often uses unconventional and discomforting stylistic choices to destabilize an audience, it just feels poorly calculated — more wrong than deliberate.

Maika Monroe’s doll-like fragility as Lee Harker channels a deeply set alienation. This is familiar territory for Perkins, who followed similarly alienated and disconnected characters in his equally empty film The Blackcoat’s Daughter. The same tropes are mostly at play here: beautiful women with glassy eyes navigate a horrifying adult world. While Harker channels Clarice from The Silence of the Lambs, this film misunderstands Clarice’s strengths — the way her fragility often represented opportunity. Instead, Monroe’s performance (which isn’t bad, but working with very little) never allows her to achieve even the illusion of control. There’s a clear disconnect in the film’s depiction of the fragility of faith, treating characters like children trapped in adult bodies. Will our prayers keep us safe? Can intuition solve a murder? Can mother protect us? The movie pulls us towards a child’s perspective of the world to attempt to capture these primal fears and the forces that uphold them. I

Narratively, Longlegs manages to be both too vague and too explanatory. It leans so heavily on the audience to build up connections in their mind based on other (once again, better) films. The final act throws all the ambiguity out the window for a blunt-force explanation of every little thing, which neither surprises nor satisfies. The film’s script feels like a void of ideas or emotions. Despite its “unusual” structure, it does little to serve any of the film’s substance.

As the film drudges on, it’s difficult not to feel trapped in a loop of a horror fancam on Instagram reels. You’re going round and round in circles, elated at first by the memories of a film you loved, but slowly beaten down by the core emptiness of the presentation. It’s a film that seems to reflect a life lived only through movies; something that does ring true for a man who literally grew up surrounded by Hollywood. Unfortunately, Perkins seems to lack any insight on how such a limited perspective might shape your view of the world. The movie instead feels like a young person who has yet to go out and live paying pale homage to the movies that inspired them — with a very limited understanding of what made them work.

Then there’s the mishandling of Nicolas Cage, one of our greatest living actors, who is caked in terrible prosthetics that only seem to hamper his performance. Instead of asking what went wrong with Longlegs, perhaps we should ask what exactly went right? Clearly, it’s the monumentally successful marketing campaign that has driven droves of horror fans to a movie that feels flimsy, convinced it’s the second coming. If Godard once said, “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world,” marketing has to be the ugliest. ■

Longlegs (directed by Osgood Perkins)

Longlegs is currently playing in Montreal theatres.

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