‘Longlegs’ Is Well-Made Nonsense

For the primary seventy or so minutes of Longlegs, the brand new movie from writer-director Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), it’s a profitable riff on the darker entries in David Fincher’s filmography. It channels the likes of Seven, Zodiac and the Netflix collection Mindhunter into one thing not fairly new, however totally different sufficient from its influences to maintain an viewers engaged. An obsessed FBI agent hunts a deranged serial killer who’s making a mythology that solely he and the agent appear to grasp. We’ve been exploring these tropes for almost forty years since Will Graham was first on the path of Hannibal Lektor (the spelling modified in future movies) in Michael Mann’s 1986 crime masterpiece Manhunter.

After spending appreciable time constructing its gritty, bleak model of actuality, Longlegs veers into the supernatural. That’s not a very surprising twist neither is it a spoiler as a result of each trailer and every bit of selling is promoting the movie as a horror film. It additionally stars modern-day scream queen Maika Monroe (It Follows, Watcher) because the FBI agent who’s tuned into Longlegs’ psychotic wavelength.

Longlegs presents itself as a thriller for almost all of its runtime, a puzzle to be solved by its investigator and by its viewers. The movie is about within the 1990’s, and Longlegs has been killing because the ‘70s. How does somebody commit these crimes on this trend for thus lengthy when he doesn’t appear to be current for the precise murders? I do know the locked-room thriller fanatics on the market are salivating at this prospect, and all I’ll say right here is: don’t get too excited. The reply is a nothing burger, as is the ultimate forty minutes or so of the movie.

This isn’t a case of keep in your cinematic lane neither is it an total ill-advised style mash-up. Crime movies with occult overtones have been round since earlier than Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie ran afoul of a cult within the people horror traditional The Wicker Man (1973). The issue is the movie’s descent into the occult muddies the narrative. The crisp, clear traces of the story turn out to be increasingly more convoluted because the third act of the movie progresses. The supernatural parts really feel like an excuse for why the movie flies of its rails earlier than the credit roll.

Maika Monroe delivers a stable, although largely one-dimensional, efficiency because the dogged Agent Harker who (regardless of being inexperienced in such issues) makes extra headway within the Longlegs case than any agent that’s come earlier than her. Her character feels (deliberately) at a take away from the motion unfolding round her as if she’s merely an observer and never a participant. I puzzled greater than as soon as if Monroe was portraying Harker as somebody with autism or some sort of spectrum dysfunction (although no point out is ever fabricated from this). Her efficiency jogged my memory of Swedish actress Sofia Helin who performed an autistic detective within the international crime collection Bron/Broen (The Bridge).

It’s good to see Blair Underwood as Harker’s boss who has the nice sense to experience her coattails to their suspect. He has the thankless “bureaucrat” position within the movie, however injects his character with humor and humanity. Underwood has at all times been an effortlessly charming display screen presence and proves that when once more right here. Nicholas Cage provides a surprisingly well-modulated efficiency because the titular serial killer. His occasional histrionics are acceptable to the tone of the movie and by no means tip into camp territory.

Osgood Perkins is clearly a gifted filmmaker. Longlegs has the grainy shot-on-film look of a grindhouse crime movie. Even its shifting facet ratios for flashbacks (a way that’s been used and abused of late) works inside the time capsule of this story. It’s a well-made crime/horror thriller that merely loses its manner within the thicket of concepts that Perkins needs to discover in his 100-minute movie.

When that occurs, the screenplay is normally responsible. Like most movies on this style, you could droop your disbelief, however the movie does start with its personal inside logic in place. Finally every reply supplied by the story breeds a number of new questions which are by no means addressed. Even the one large “twist” that arrives mid-film left me questioning in the event that they had been actually presenting the event as a twist. It appeared apparent from the earliest moments of the movie.

In the long run, the thriller itself isn’t a lot of a thriller. Mud off your Scooby Doo crime-solving abilities, and unmasking the particular person helping Longlegs is painfully simple. So far as the supernatural angle is anxious, you simply want to recollect the warning supplied by nation celebrity Waylon Jennings in 1973: “The satan made me do it the primary time, the second time I accomplished it alone.”