By David Dent
If, like me, you’ve admired rather than loved the previous three features from Osgood – or Oz as he prefers – Perkins, and hoped he’d up the pace a bit with future projects, then people your prayers have been answered.
Longlegs bolts out of the traps with the wind whistling about its ears. Don’t get me wrong, some of Perkins’s stillness and static shot composure still exists, but it’s the beautiful combination of these two approaches that makes his fourth movie great.
Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, familiar from It Follows) is a policewoman with a difference; she has an inner psychopath sniffer dog ability, which gives her the edge over her colleagues in locating the bad people, even though this ‘gift’ may be related to something in her distant past.
Harker is assigned to a thirty-year unsolved string of murders – unusually the victims are all entire families – perpetrated by someone called ‘Longlegs’ (Nic Cage, extreme as ever but unrecognisable under grotesque prosthetics) who leaves tantalising runic style clues but has so far evaded capture.
But her attachment to the case brings her closer to the elusive killer; Longlegs – and his coded clues – become a puzzle for the inscrutable Harker, otherwise unable to interact socially or indeed relate to her hoarder mother Ruth (Alicia Witt); the Saga Norén character in the Nordic TV series The Bridge, but with slightly better manners.
Perkins ramps up the tension from the word go: screen ratios are played with (this has one of the best opening credit scenes you’re likely to see all year and should boost some T. Rex album sales); Lynchesque characters pop up at regular intervals (the movie is not without a strong strand of mordant humour); and the figure of Longlegs himself, internally and externally truly frightening, is Cage at his best.
Longlegs builds to a climax that reminded me in tone of the best bits of Ari Aster’s 2018 movie Hereditary, but there’s a level of menace and dread operating in Perkins’s film that puts it in a class of its own. An amazing achievement.
Longlegs is out now in UK cinemas.
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