LONGLEGS : Tuesday 23rd July 2024.

I saw the MA15+ rated 'LONGLEGS' at my local multiplex earlier this week, and this American horror film is Written and Directed by Osgood Perkins, whose prior feature film credits take in his debut with 'The Blackcoat's Daughter' in 2015, then 'I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House' in 2016, 'Gretel & Hansel' in 2020 with 'The Monkey' based on a 1980 short story by Stephen King set for a cinema release in February 2025. Released in the US last week, this film has garnered generally positive reviews and has so far grossed US$59M off the back of a production budget of less than US$10M. 

The film opens with car driving along a snow covered road and coming to halt outside a remote house. It is Oregon, sometime in the 1970's. A little girl observes the car, puts on a winter jacket and goes outside to investigate. She follows a strange voice coming from behind the house and is confronted by a man wearing pale makeup and long white straggly hair who is acting erratically. 

We then fast forward to sometime in the 1990's, and newly recruited FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) seems to posses the gift of intuition in the field, as is evidenced when she correctly points to a local house on a cookie-cutter estate in which a murderer is hiding, and whom she captures, but not before the murderer had gunned down Agent Horatio Fisk (Dakota Daulby), Harker's partner while he was conducting a routine house to house enquiry.

As a result of her testing for possible precognition she is assigned to a decades-long case of a series of brutal murder/suicides involving families throughout Oregon state. In each incident, the father brutally murdered his wife and children before taking his own life, and left behind at each crime scene a letter with cryptic, seemingly Satanic coding, that is signed 'Longlegs'. The handwriting belongs to none of the victims, despite no forensic evidence of any home invasion or third parties having been present.

While Harker is talking on the phone one night to her mother, she is visited by a mysterious figure who leaves behind a 9th birthday card with a coded message. Harker decodes the text with the aid of a Bible, which states that if she reveals to anyone how she figured out the code, Longlegs will kill her mother. Harker is able to quickly connect certain similarities between the families, namely that each had at least one nine-year-old daughter born on the 14th of the month, and the murders all occurred within six days before or after the birthday itself. When scribed out on a linear calendar, the dates of the murders form an occult symbol of an inverted triangle, with one date missing to complete the shape. 

Armed with a clue, Harker and her supervisor, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) travel to a remote farmstead some eighty miles away and there upstairs in a barn, unearth a doll buried under the floorboards of one of the former crime scenes. A forensics expert performs an autopsy on the life size and realistic looking doll and inside its head, find a strange metal orb that emits high energy sounds despite being empty inside. Despite Carter's skepticism of the supernatural, Harker hatches a theory that each family received a similar doll from Longlegs, and he has been infusing the orbs within each doll with some sort of evil energy that can possess and influence those in close proximity to it. Carter grows concerned that Harker is connected to Longlegs after seeing hints of Longlegs' knowledge of Harker and her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt).

Harker visits her mother who still lives in the same home that she grew up in, who denies any memory of her daughters 9th birthday but subtly directs her to search through her childhood belongings, as she never throws anything out. Harker finds a chest in her childhood bedroom containing a pile of Polaroids. Among them is a picture of the pale-faced man, revealing her to be the girl from the films introduction. Knowing now that she was visited by Longlegs (Nicolas Cage, who also Co-Produces here), she hands the picture over to Carter, allowing the FBI to track him down and arrest him at a bus stop with two suitcases containing letters written in the same Satanic code.

After realising the missing date on the inverted triangle is that day, Harker believes Longlegs may have an accomplice. In the interrogation room, he tells her that he serves 'the man downstairs'. He tells Harker to question her mother's involvement in his crimes, proclaiming 'Hail Satan' before repeatedly slamming his face and jaw into the metal table, finally killing himself after splintering open his forehead and nose. 

Agent Carter is somewhat distressed that Harker's line of questioning led Longlegs to kills himself so bringing their investigations to a premature end. Agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) seeing that Harker is in no fit state to drive herself, drives Harker back to her mother's home. While investigating the house, Harker witnesses her mother unloading with both barrels of a shotgun on Browning who was waiting patiently in the car for Harker to return. Harker then stumbles to a back yard and sees Ruth shooting the head off a doll resembling a young nine-year-old Harker, causing her to lose consciousness.

Seen in flashback, it is revealed that Ruth has been Longlegs' accomplice ever since Lee's encounter with him as a child. Longlegs returned in the night to attack and subdue Ruth, forcing her to make a choice—let her daughter be murdered as part of the ritual, or to comply with his wishes to spare her. She complied, leaving Lee to be the missing birthday on the triangle. Longlegs has lived in the Harker house basement ever since, creating dolls he would infuse with his Satanic magic. Ruth would pose as a nun delivering a gift from the church to bring the dolls to the families who are then possessed and proceed to kill one another. Lee's doll has been guiding her with the Satanic influence of Longlegs since that time.

Coming around in the basement to the sound of a distant phone ringing, Harker makes her way upstairs to the kitchen and answers the phone to hear a demonic voice proclaim, 'You're late for Ruby's party'. Realising Agent Carter's daughter, Ruby (Ava Kelders), has her ninth birthday that day and that the Carters' deaths would complete Longlegs' triangle, Harker races over to the Carter household to intervene, only to discover that Ruth had already delivered the doll to the family, who are all already possessed. After Carter murders his wife in the kitchen, Harker shoots and kills Carter to protect Ruby. Ruth stands up maniacally brandishing a dagger, leaving Harker little option but to shoot and kill her mother with a bullet to the forehead. Harker tries to shoot the doll's head, but her gun is either out of ammunition or it jams. She then tells Ruby they need to leave but remains transfixed on the doll. 

With 'Longlegs' Director and scribe Osgood Perkins has crafted a chilling and thrilling slow burn police procedural horror film that is akin to 'Silence of the Lambs' with a little bit of 'Se7en' thrown in for good measure, and his film succeeds on almost every level. Maika Monroe's performance is a stand-out and Nicolas Cage still has what it takes to play the gonzo bat-shit crazy unhinged role that this film requires. The film mixes the supernatural with the psychological all woven together in a neat package that is at once terrifying, creepy and will crawl under your skin and hibernate there long after the end credits have rolled. 

'Longlegs' warrants four claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five claps.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-