Longlegs
The house, white against the snow, the almost-birthday girl with yellow ribbons in her hair, running downstairs and outside in her red jacket to see who the stranger is who has just pulled up outside in their car, a childhood memory faded by time until it is almost lost but which leaves a mark upon her, a shadow over a life which will be strange, eventful, and tainted by sadness which over time will gather itself into horror and tragedy…
Years later, FBI Special Agent Lee Harker’s ability to draw inferences from the barest of evidence and what others might disregard as irrelevant has brought her to the attention of her supervisor who has asked her to review ten murder cases from across the state of Oregon over a period of thirty-five years, whole families killed by one of their own who then killed themselves with no apparent outside influence other than letters found at the scene, written in code and each signed in the name of Longlegs…
Inhabiting an eerie and disturbing space somewhere between The X-Files and Zodiac where nothing can be trusted and the overhanging skies are stormy, Longlegs is written and directed by Gretel & Hansel‘s Osgood Perkins, starring It Follows‘ Maika Monroe and Bad Hair‘s Blair Underwood as Agents Harker and Carter with Totally Killer‘s Kiernan Shipka as Carrie Anne Camera, the only survivor of Longlegs’ unwanted affections, now confined to an asylum.
A new recruit handed a weighty caseload which becomes her obsession, Harker’s unease makes her seem surly to those who don’t understand her but despite her dismissal of her supposed ability to turn a hunch into a breakthrough Carter stands by his protégé, joking that a half psychic is better than none at all, but even beyond the dark wooden panelled rooms where she sits seeking patterns in aging documents there is little light to brighten her life.
Her only family her mother, Ruth (Twin Peaks’ Alicia Witt) is only a telephone call away yet is already distant and forever receding further, devoted to God and prayer but lost to the world, broken by the dread of Longlegs which imbues every frame of the film, the title character a shadow which hangs over all the lives he has touched, even at a distance, barely glimpsed and kept out of frame as though neither the camera nor the eye can gaze upon him and remain sane.
A downward spiral of dead ends, dead-eyed dolls and conversations with deranged minds, at the centre of the tangled web sits Mandy’s Nicolas Cage in one of his strangest performances in a career marked by swimming against the current, a monstrous convocation of Charles Manson and Tiny Tim who wheedles and manipulates, who never lays a finger on his victims but who can compel others to do his will, Longlegs a creepy film which lurks in the darkness of dusty basements and lofts filled with boxes hiding the horror of memories better forgotten.
Longlegs will be on general release from Friday 12th July
