Longlegs

Call me crazy, but I like horror movies to be scary (or at least creepy). The latest from Osgood Perkins is a banal blend of unscary horror and inert action that I can't see how anyone can find compelling unless they are looking at it strictly through an extratextual lens; in this case, the old standbys of "what is this auteur director's intention?" and "what will Nic Cage do next?" Maika Monroe stars as a newly recruited FBI agent so emotionally repressed and with such a questionable backstory it’s impossible to take seriously the idea that she would have ever been accepted into the bureau. She's on the hunt for a satanic serial killer who's been responsible for the murders of multiple families across America, leaving behind clues and patterns for her to discover. Nicolas Cage plays the mysterious killer, known as Longlegs, in a performance and makeup so silly it's impossible to find him even the least bit menacing.

In Perkins' earlier films like The Blackcoat's Daughter, he was able to use his limited budget to his advantage, but such is not the case here. The "mystery" element, like every aspect of this minimalist (except for the gore) movie, is contrived and predictable simply because of how few characters there are populating the picture. When you essentially have five actors in your movie, ya gotta give them more to play than this. And when you have so little characterization to draw viewers in, casting a star with an outsized screen presence like Cage means we can never see past the actor. Perkins doubles down on this by hiding his star under elaborate makeup so that we literally can not see the actor past the mask he wears. But not being able to see Cage doesn't undo the issue of not being able to see past the movie star to get to the character; it just makes it worse.