### Osgood Perkins' Cinematic Journey and His Latest Film, "Longlegs"
Writer/director Osgood Perkins began his filmmaking career with "The Blackcoat’s Daughter" (2015), a film that offered a chronology-confounding, gender-switched, somewhat Satanic twist on the "Psycho" films that made his father, actor Anthony Perkins, famous. He followed this with the moodily haunting ghost story "I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House" (2016) and the feminist fairytale retelling "Gretel & Hansel" (2020). His latest film, "Longlegs," perhaps most closely resembles his debut and briefly features Kiernan Shipka from that film. Like all his films, it focuses on a female protagonist but stands out as a unique entity.
While loosely borrowing elements from Jonathan Demme’s "Silence of the Lambs" (1991), David Fincher’s "Seven" (1995), and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s "Cure" (1997), "Longlegs" remains elusive and hard to pin down. The title's twin associations with 'daddy' and a spindly, spidery kind of predation eventually play out in the narrative.
The film opens with a scene in the early Seventies, shown in Academy ratio with rounded-off corners. Nicolas Cage, heavily made-up and delivering an unhinged performance, plays cat and mouse with a little girl, Lauren Acala, around her snow-covered house. His face remains half out of shot, as though the frame can barely contain him. By the mid-Nineties, during the height of the Satanic panic, the film switches to a more conventional widescreen presentation. Only occasional flashbacks return to the squared-off frame to distinguish between past and present, childhood and adulthood. These memory sequences resemble period-appropriate 16mm home movies, highlighting the film’s focus on diabolically dysfunctional domestic dynamics. There is even a family with the surname ‘Camera.’
Rookie FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who has a 'half-psychic' gift of clairvoyant intuition, is partnered with family man Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) to track down the serial killer Longlegs. This killer has been at large for decades, leaving cryptic messages at horrific scenes of domestic murder-suicides, although there is no evidence that Longlegs himself was ever present. Lee follows bizarre clues that seem to be left just for her, leading closer to home where her religious mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) hoards memories.
The film’s mix of coded letters, creepy dolls, and creeping dread hints at a subtext of domestic abuse, gaslighting, and PTSD, but it never confines itself to this interpretation. Instead, it creates a pervasive sense of the irrational and uncanny, where everything feels alarmingly wrong. This effect is achieved through insidious sound design, Andres Arochi’s canted angles, Monroe’s dazed panic, disorienting cuts by editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng, and Danny Vermette’s brilliantly skewed production design. Even the wood-paneled atrium of Lee’s home feels subtly off.
Ultimately, the film is committed to realizing something that defies reason, leaving viewers struggling to understand or cope with its demonic assault on the senses. As a forensic examiner describes a metal ball embedded in a realistic homunculus recovered from a cold case scene, saying “There’s nothing in there,” his words could summarize the film itself. Investigative logic collides with vacant nihilism, creating a pure, palpable evil seldom seen in today’s cinema. As characters play to someone else’s mean-spirited script, domestic nests are cuckooed, no one is a free agent, and Perkins emerges as the master manipulator and real devil.
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