Starring Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage  

Written and Directed by Osgood Perkins

Black Bear International, in cinemas now.

A young FBI Agent with paranormal instincts, is brought in to track down a brutal serial killer and make sense of the occult clues left at every crime scene.

The first ten minutes of Osgood Perkins’ latest paranormal chiller, Longlegs, had me salivating in anticipation. In the form of a Super-8 memory, a small girl encounters a bloated, grotesque Nicolas Cage, only partially revealed for added chills. Moving forward to the 1990s (crucially before CCTV became ubiquitous), a young FBI agent in pursuit of a killer mysteriously intuits where the shooter will be, but is disbelieved by her colleague with disastrous consequences.

So far, so scary, asking the question as to how on earth (!) these two events can be connected; however…

…rather easily and schematically is the disappointing answer. There’s no doubt that Longlegs is a good looking film with its bleak washed-out cinematography, but after a while I was willing the camera to move a little more, in the hope that something unexpected might liven things up a bit.

The problem with this movie – aside from being not in the least bit scary – is that it’s a narrative without revelation. Sure, there’s shed loads of backstory – but by the time it is recounted to us in a lengthy retrospective info-dump, I had pretty much worked it all out anyway. The twists, such as they are, come honking over the horizon like a ten-ton truck.

Story-wise it’s something to do with a series of mysterious family annihilations where for no good reason at all the perpetrator (or perpetrators) leave coded runic messages (bizarrely the FBI’s best cryptographers have been unable to work out what turns out to be a pretty basic letter code, but hey, let that one pass). Our young FBI agent, Lee Harker (twitchily portrayed by Maika Monroe) manages to crack it, leading to some kind of unintelligible mathematical pattern, which might be interesting if it made any sense or had some kind of emotional meaning. As it stands, what we’re left with is a sort of watered down paranormal rehash of David Fincher’s Seven stirred to a lumpy custard with dollops of The Silence of the Lambs for good measure.

Oh yes, and there’s something about dolls and steel balls.

Lots of ‘stuff’ in this film, but none of it hangs together.

And as for Nic Cage, gurning under prosthetics as the eponymous serial killer, the titular Longlegs is supposed (for reasons that are never explained) to have an obsession with the late Marc Bolan, however I was struggling not to giggle out loud at his closer resemblance to 1960s one-hit-wonder Tiny Tim, complete with whiney falsetto voice. I kept hoping he’d give us a rendition of Tiptoe Through the Tulips.

Verdict: There’s a half decent idea lurking in here somewhere, but without an elegantly developing on-screen narrative (it’s completely reliant on backstory) and with everything played at the same pitch throughout, Longlegs makes for a pretty shapeless 100 minutes of not being at all scared in a cinema. 5/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com