Reviews
‘Longlegs’ Review – Oz Perkins’ Latest Gets Under Your Skin and Festers Like a Putrid Nightmare
The concept of evil gets explored often in horror in various ways, but very few films manage to immerse viewers in that evil so wholly that it starts to feel like you’re watching something taboo and cursed. The latest by writer/director Oz Perkins (Gretel & Hansel, The Blackcoat’s Daughter), Longlegs gets under your skin and stays there, immersing you so thoroughly in the repulsive, discomforting nature of evil through terrifying imagery and a tactile atmosphere that it’s unshakable. Its nerve-shredding, insidious style of horror serves as a perfect rebuttal to society’s obsession with true crime; evil just exists, and it taints everything it touches.
Much like the marketing, Longlegs plays it close to the vest as it follows young FBI recruit Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), whose uncanny sense of intuition draws the attention of the tenured Agent Carter (Blair Underwood). Harker is so naturally gifted that Carter pulls the agent into his ongoing investigation of serial killer Longlegs (an unrecognizable Nicolas Cage), a demented figure so elusive that the trail to catch him has gone cold. The more that Harker makes headway on the case, though, the stranger things get as Longlegs takes notice of her pursuit. It sets both on a collision course filled with grisly crime scenes and unspeakable evil.
Oz Perkins unmoors Longlegs from time and reality in a way that intentionally disorients, contributing to a pervading and suffocating sense of dread and foreboding. Small details, like a portrait of Bill Clinton hung behind Agent Carter’s desk, give a general feeling of the era, but the sepia hues and vintage aesthetic speak more to Longlegs’ lengthy history with murder spanning multiple decades, so much so that the killer feels otherworldly. That’s further helped by Nicolas Cage’s most unsettling performance yet. Perkins refreshingly keeps this curious character as enigmatic and elusive as possible, giving only glimpses into the killer’s machinations and treating him more as a peculiar boogeyman. It makes the short bursts of Cage’s eerie freakouts all the more impactful and unnerving.
Cage is operating in rare, depraved form, but the entire cast is firing on all cylinders. Underwood infuses his character with enough warmth and savvy to balance Monroe’s socially awkward, closed-off Lee, helping humanize the prickly protagonist as he mentors her. Alicia Witt is also in rare form as Lee’s mom, a disturbed hoarder who reminds Lee to keep up her prayers. Lee shrugs her mother’s prodding off, but the increasingly oppressive atmosphere suggests that perhaps she should listen.
It’s not just the grainy vintage look, the eerie sound design, and moody color palette that contributes to Perkins’ ability to capture the essence of evil on screen so well. It’s in the subtle, almost subliminal imagery that’s constantly present. Almost imperceptible silhouettes and demonic forms are lurking in the background in scenes. Voyeuristic shadowed figures or inhuman eyes linger just enough to catch your notice before fading quietly into the ether.
Lee’s bid to thwart Longlegs builds to a suitably insane finale, with no shortage of grotesque and shocking violence along the way. Violence that is rendered more effective thanks to the skin-crawling tone that Perkins sets from the outset. Longlegs injects a true crime story with putrid Satanism and refuses to handhold, serving as a visceral rebuttal to society’s compulsive need to find logic in the most heinous of crimes. Evil simply exists, and in Longlegs, it’s everywhere, watching and biding its time while reveling in the carnage its presence wreaks.
Longlegs is as stylish as it is timeless, dripping with claustrophobic dread and rot.
Longlegs releases in theaters on July 12, 2024.
Editor’s Note: This review was originally published on June 10, 2024.
Reviews
‘Her Private Hell’ Review: Nicolas Winding Refn Returns With a Hypnotic, Inscrutable Neon Fever Dream
Nicolas Winding Refn considers his first feature film in ten years, Her Private Hell, a resurrection. At the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, the filmmaker revealed that his return was inspired, in large part, by his own mortality. His need to create art kicked into overdrive after beating death in 2023, when his heart stopped for 25 minutes.
Her Private Hell is pure art, too, bearing the filmmaker’s neon and synth signatures, as well as a deep disinterest in scrutable storytelling. Much like The Neon Demon, Refn’s latest demands you bend to its wavelength: an expressionistic vision more interested in the artistic process than the narrative.
That’s not to say that Her Private Hell lacks plot; this sci-fi horror noir features two central overlapping plots. At the forefront is actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who lives in the penthouse suite overlooking a hazy neon metropolis with her father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), and young stepmom Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), who happens to be Elle’s former best friend before marriage got in the way.
To say that Elle has daddy issues would be an understatement, made worse by insecurities, the arrival of a new acting ingenue (Kristine Froseth), and a vicious killer prowling the city: the Leather Man.
The secondary plot follows the enigmatic Private K (Charles Melton), an American soldier in Japan with resolute vengeance on his mind. Whereas Elle’s world exists in a space of glamour and opulence, Private K pummels his way bare-knuckled through the sweaty backstreets ruled by local crime syndicates down below.
Refn, who co-writes with Esti Giordani, manages to corral a variety of seemingly disparate genres and influences into a clinically cold and cryptic whole. The filmmaker infuses his signature style with everything from ’60s sci-fi to Golden Age Hollywood melodrama to Japanese folklore, hung on the framework of a Dario Argento-style Giallo. There’s a prominent psychosexual edge to both Elle and Private K’s separate journeys, one that dials up to zany excess when it comes to the former character.
There’s an overarching sense of mystic mythmaking to Her Private Hell, with elusive seamstresses, played by Shioli Kutsuna and Aoi Yamada, dipping in and out like folkloric, omnipotent kitsune as they seemingly preside over the increasing chaos that entails brutal knife fights, Freudian melodrama, and a supernatural killer that brutally rips his victims apart. All of it told with Refn’s detached, sterile style.
It’s less a conventional movie and more a stream of consciousness, a collection of inspirations and personal thoughts and themes. Nothing is really explained in this nonsensical fairy tale fever dream. Thatcher gives herself fully to the spoiled Elle, whose affluent privilege makes her a bundle of raw, primal emotions that erodes her sense of identity and reality. It makes her the tonal and visual opposite of the elusive Private K., and much credit goes to Refn, Melton, and Thatcher for wringing compelling performances out of such nebulous, vague characters.
As with most of Refn’s work, you’re either on his frequency or not. Her Private Hell is wholly uninterested in explanation or convention. It’s also heavily disjointed and unhurried in its eclectic, sparse amalgamation of genre inspirations. Still, it’s tough not to fall sway to the magnetic allure of its exquisite, pulse-pounding sights and sounds, complete with an incredible score by legendary composer Pino Donaggio.
While it never fully pulls you into its tangled web of artistic musings, there’s a lot to admire in a technically stunning feature this fearless in its incomprehensibility and ambition.
Her Private Hell releases in theaters on July 24.
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