The mise-en-scène is the message
There’s a debate raging on obscure corners of the internet as to whether Nicolas Cage can act. Some think he’s a hack; I, for one, would like to point the doubters to the Martin Scorsese film Bringing Out the Dead, starring Cage as an exhausted paramedic. Seeing Cage’s other virtues —namely, his admitted and admittedly quite entertaining tendency towards ham rivaling that of Porky Pig— was a big part of the draw for me to see him play a serial killer in 2024’s Longlegs, written and directed by Osgood Perkins, distributed by Neon in the United States and Black Bear International in the United States. Surprisingly, though, Cage turns out to be overshadowed in this film.
‘Longlegs’ is the nom de plume of a man who leaves letters at people’s homes, all in Oregon, spanning the 1960s to the 1990s (the latter being the time of the film’s events) in code, signing them with that appellation. These homes are invariably the sites of brutal murders, where the father ends up killing his entire family, and then himself, via all sorts of grisly methods, but Longlegs himself can never be directly tied to the murders by the worldly methods of the FBI forensics team that has to hunt him down. All these families have daughters of a certain age, with birthdays at a particular time of the month. It is this bloody tapestry that agent Lee Harker, played by Maika Monroe, has to unravel. It turns out Harker has her own complicated secrets, worldly and otherwise.
I had never heard of Maika Monroe before watching this film; upon seeing her filmography, I noticed she’d been in Independence Day: Resurgence, a film I mainly remember for the novelty that I saw it on the day it was set (the Fourth of July, 2016), and with only so many memorable qualities. It also showed me how much in the horror genre I have missed; I’m still a relative newbie and I clearly have some catching up to do. I was surprised to find myself paying more attention to her than to Cage, and indeed was more invested in her character than in Cage’s. Monroe gives Harker just the right combination of inquisitiveness, bookishness, aloofness, and hesitation as she peels the onion of these murder cases and finds more and more revelations she hates but has to know.
Harker is deeply isolated, some would say deeply weird, recovering from a very strange upbringing. In the beginning of the film, you see her house; she lives alone in a building in the woods with very few lights. This, in part, allows the film to create dread by virtue of obfuscation (darkness terrified even our distant ancestors), but it also shows you, very starkly, who she is. She is troubled, intensely so. Her desk is, frankly, a mess, a fact which was incredibly relatable and I suspect will be to a number of readers here.
Harker’s house is a good example of how the film uses place. Most of the environments in this film are residential, cozy, and domestic. These are homes where people can be their true selves after selling their souls to capitalism, and they are homes with families in them, children in them. There is innocence and love in these places, making a contrast to Harker’s home which is itself revealing. Longlegs then saunters into these environments with his wiles like the Mule in Asimov’s Foundation, breaking the script; the place of self-actualization is transformed into a place where people begin to act out of character, brutally so, and to everyone’s pain and regret. He rips these places apart, figuratively and literally, and with plenty of bloodshed in the process.
There is a broader contrast to the FBI offices you see, all spartan, bland, uninviting, with clunky, boxy computers (like those of my childhood) and visible portraits of Bill Clinton to remind you of the setting, and in some cases very dark, where Harker works on the grisly case and falls ever more into its maw. It is very fitting, then, that Harker’s home becomes something an extension of the FBI offices in a thematic sense. The only people she can be herself with are an old friend and her mother, and you get the impression that the relationship with the latter is strained, forced into the comportations of parent and child that do not want to reveal things to each other. That thread of disrupted domesticity runs through the narrative, made particularly effective in a scene set in a barn, which twists that even further in a devilishly disturbing way.
The film’s 1990s setting helps this particular form of tone-setting in that it’s a world where light is a bit more remote than in 2024. You don’t have a shiny box in your pocket that can provide light, or even become a flashlight (although, all too often, accidentally). It’s a small bit, but it’s an effective one, a far more subdued version of the remote cabin in Puritan New England in The VVitch; it is a world where light is something that can be controlled by the main characters only in limited ways.
Monroe’s performance is helped very much by the fact that, unfortunately, the script never quite figures out what to do with Cage. His is a fairly flat character, perfectly good at being unsettling but with not much more than that. He is properly deranged, sometimes quite entertainingly so, especially when in public, or driving, but amusing glossolalia does not a compelling character make. Likewise, the makeup on him is very good and suitably eerie. You leave the theater with the sense that, for all its virtues, the film underused Cage, which is surprising given how much the man can do when he gives it his all. Cage is perfectly good for the part, but the part wasn’t enough for Cage.
Longlegs is a film about home: who is in it, what we get from it, who we let in, and what those people do when we let them in. As real life will tell you, not all visitors are well-intentioned, and Cage’s character is far more sinister than your regular door-to-door huckster. The film’s narrative is bolstered by a main character with a compellingly tenuous relationship to the concept of home, and brought to life by Maika Monroe's stunning performance. If it could have gotten more out of Cage, with the two of them given the chance to really play off each other, it could have been truly great. Unfortunately, the film never gets to that point, with the villain feeling rather caged in, but the end result is still reasonably entertaining.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
