‘Long Legs’ movie review: Horror takes centre stage

‘Long legs’

Manager: Osgood Perkins

Artists: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood…

Gender: Terror

Premiere: 08/2/24

★★★★

‘Longlegs’ represents Osgood Perkins’ definitive recognition, given its success in the United States (“The Sentence of Evil”) had not yet broken the ceiling of a cult director. But he was a cult filmmaker, and in short, the reasons for this cult were an unconventional take on the horror genre, a storytelling approach (structure, rhythm, characters) that was far from tradition, elusive and at the same time unconventional, a disturbing idea of ​​evil as something abstract and uncontrollable, and above all, a clear concern with staging fear. Perhaps the latter is the most striking, because it is fundamentally not a common practice in contemporary horror.

Perkins sets the scene, thinks about the images, and is creative in his conception of the shot, as well as in the way he breaks the shot apart in unexpected ways.. ‘Long Legs’ is all that again. And for the first fifty minutes or so (and that’s a lot of minutes) it’s pushed to the limit. Maybe the first half of that crossover between thriller and horror movieThis is the best film Perkins has ever made, a reinterpretation of ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991), starting with a magnificent prologue. Everything in this department works: the aesthetic, hallucinatory and strangely calm representation of the environments in which the story takes place, the hermetic psychology of the heroine (Maika Monroe) and Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), the restrained presentation of the monster and the deeply disturbing conflict between his grotesque nature (magnificent character design) and the restraint of the rest.

It’s also quite exciting when evil sneaks into the images or hijacks them.Although whether these sinister visual hijinks, these independent images, have been sustained over time as representations of evil or whether they serve a merely cosmetic function remains to be confirmed in future examinations. At one point ‘Long Legs’ lurches forward and its resolution is a little frustrating. Not because it didn’t work, but because Perkins abandoned the most invigorating ideas (the most mysterious, the most frightening) for the sake of playing it safe. But they’re still there, and they’re good enough that he can’t be forgiven for that mistake.