From writer/director Osgood Perkins comes Longlegs, a thriller about a satanic serial killer and the FBI agent trying to catch him before he strikes again.
Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is a young FBI agent. When we meet her, she is canvassing a neighborhood with her partner, looking for anyone who might have seen a killer. After intuition guides her to the house where the killer is hiding, the FBI gives her a battery of tests that conclude that she has some amount of psychic ability. Then, she is partnered with Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) to find the serial killer known as “Longlegs.” But sinister connections exist beneath the surface between Harker and Longlegs that go back to when Harker was a child and Longlegs’ next victim might be closer to home than Harker thinks.
While I thought it was a fine movie, I don’t know if it lives up to the hype for me. With a run time of 1:41, I wanted about 20-30 of further character development for it to be as impactful as it wants to be. There are a lot of good ideas in this movie but, while I don’t need everything spelled out for me, I don’t think that there’s enough there to call it “the best serial killer drama since Silence of the Lambs.” What about Seven? Hitting a little closer to the mark, what about Suspect Zero, if we’re talking about psychic FBI agents?
As a final note, I feel that I’ve seen it enough in recent movies that I can safely call something that’s becoming a trope in horror movies–or at the very least, something that just seems to be part of the current zeitgeist: a character committing suicide by beating themselves to death, either by repeatedly slamming something against their face or repeatedly slamming their face into a stationary object. It’s interesting to me to see something like this being used across different movies and it kind of makes me want to seek out the first use of this kind of brutal death. If you happen to know the first use of this kind of kill, drop it in a comment.
The Chimerical Dark 