One of the features of this odd summer we've been living through is the fact that, while some big studio films have been and gone from theatres in the space of a couple of weeks, a few less-substantial offerings have been hanging around much longer than you would have expected: Wicked Little Letters seemingly played at our local independent forever, The Chimera had a surprisingly good run for a subtitled Italian movie with a distinctly art-housey sensibility, and still showing in a range of cinemas is Osgood Perkins' Longlegs, which on paper looks like the sort of thing that only plays briefly in a late-night slot at the trashier city centre multiplex.

Then again, this has been an unusually well-reviewed movie, all things considered. The publicity department have been quick to festoon posters with quotes like 'Unforgettable!', 'A masterpiece!', 'The best horror film of the year!' and 'The scariest film of the decade!' I'm always reminded on these occasions of Jonathan Ross describing Batman Forever as 'one of the greatest movies ever made' in a national newspaper review, just to win a bet, but. . . well, what are our options here? Either this is a genuinely terrifying, instant-classic horror film, or a lot of legitimate reviewers who should really know better have got rather overexcited.

The film opens with a flashback to the mid-seventies with a small girl being lured from her home on a snowy day by a mysterious noise. The mysterious noise proves to be Nicolas Cage (who also produces) shouting 'Coo-eee!' in a silly high-pitched voice, and a moment which is presumably meant to be both shocking and sinister. From here we go quickly into the credits, and then meet novice FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, who's been working steadily if somewhat obscurely since It Follows and the Independence Day sequel).

It turns out that Harker, conveniently enough, is either 'half psychic' or just highly intuitive, depending on who you talk to, and this leads her crusty old boss Carter (Blair Underwood, who has likewise kept on trucking since his youthful turn on L.A. Law) to assign her to a series of murders stretching back decades – in every case a family has been murdered around the time of their child's birthday, and coded letters have been found at the crime scenes (all signed 'Longlegs'), but there is no evidence of an outside party being there to actually commit the killings.

Well, Harker gets on with the case, and soon manages to break the code on the notes – although she's helped quite a bit when Longlegs obligingly breaks into her house and leaves her a cheat sheet, something she neglects to mention at work. Nevertheless, this leads them to a previous crime scene and a spooky doll. . .

I would love to go into more detail about the increasingly outlandish and bizarre turns the plot of Longlegs takes from this point on, but we're already a fair way into the movie (it's a slow starter, but the pace picks up as it goes on) and I wouldn't want to, erm, spoil it, if that's the right word.

It seems easy to figure out the kind of film Osgood Perkins wants to make here – it starts off very Silence of the Lambs-ish, complete with a setting in the 1990s, and initially sticks to its FBI-procedural approach with a fair amount of discipline. Then it goes a little bit slasher movie-ish, before the whole subplot about the doll kicks in. From this point on the movie is really all over the place, with Perkins throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks – there's Satanism, childhood trauma, spooky toys, an evil shotgun-toting nun, demonic phone calls apparently from Hell itself, and so on. It is, in short, more than a bit nuts and – a couple of low-hanging-fruit jump scares aside – not what you'd properly call scary.

This is before we even get to the contribution of Nicolas Cage, whose latest final movie this is (he still has a couple more final movies in post-production, so don't panic just yet). Cage doesn't appear in any of the publicity for the movie, presumably to give the impression he looks too disturbing for unsuspecting audiences to be allowed to see. Well, gotta have a gimmick, as they say on Broadway. The prosthetic make-up on Cage is. . . well, the uninitiated probably wouldn't recognise him at all. I think he looks like Jennifer Saunders made up as a rather elderly Joker.

Now, obviously, we like Nicolas Cage pretty much unconditionally around here, even if he did make Jiu Jitsu, which is probably one of the very worst films I've ever seen. Sometimes he can be a subtle, intelligent, extremely effective actor. And sometimes he goes off in a. . . different direction, which can also be highly entertaining. Well, in this film he gets the chance to play a T-Rex loving, toy-making, possibly slightly gender-fluid Satan-worshipping serial killer with magic powers, so I invite you to speculate as to which of the Cages turns up.

If you've gone for the same Cage who won the Oscar thirty years ago – well, you get one more guess. This film's Cage is the one who often departs the realm of conventional performance entirely. In short, he goes so far over the top that by the end of the film it's only NASA's deep space monitoring array that can keep track of where he's ended up. As often happens with Cage, there is a definite pleasure to be derived from this, but the end result is funny rather than disturbing or frightening.

And this is really a problem, considering it already has issues with the sheer peculiarity of the plot (which, it seems to me, may have holes in it anyway). There's a sort of brooding atmosphere early on which is well sustained, and none of the other acting is bad per se, even if Monroe and Underwood (along with Alicia Witt as Monroe's mum) are all required to basically give single-note performances for most of the film. . . but what Cage is doing is just weird, and not in a this-will-make-the-film-better way. But we like Nick Cage so I'm going to say this one's mostly on the director.

Of course, it may just be me, jaded and desensitised as I am, and Longlegs really is the thoroughly scary and credible horror movie many people would have you believe it is. It's certainly done very well financially, so I should probably start bracing myself for the prospect of a sequel in a couple of years' time. But even so – it's not a terrible or particularly offensive film, but the mixture of gritty realism and bizarre strangeness never quite coheres into a satisfying or frightening whole.

Awix

12.08.24 Front Page

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