The Longlegs Trailer Tells Us Almost Nothing, Except That We're Definitely Seated for Longlegs
Courtesy of NEON
I’m a sucker for good promo, and Osgood Perkins' Longlegs might be enjoying the best rollout of the year so far. It’s the J.J. Abrams blockbuster promo method, but for a thriller: The production company NEON (Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall) has been releasing super short teaser clips for the last four months that offer zero context, which in turn makes them even more tantalizing. The prospect of a 30-second ad being enough to make your skin crawl just makes you need to know more. And more has finally arrived in the form of a full-length trailer that was released today.
Every couple of years across the last three decades, someone tries to recapture the engrossing bad vibes of The Silence of the Lambs. You know the formula: ingenue female FBI agent, true-thespian actor putting the full weight of their theater background to use as a Grade A serial-killing wackjob, and an overall dreary mood as dictated by bad weather and ominous lighting. True Crime as high art. More often than not, the energy is, unsurprisingly, not restored, and we’re left with a pale imitation at best, or a forgettable dud at worst.
But of all the genres Hollywood keeps swinging away at, this one remains one of the most enduring—America loves a good serial killer story. Longlegs is this year’s big artsy swing, and despite the cyclical nature of the hype-meets-meh wheel that always turns on these types of movies, damn it, I’m all the way in on this one.
That's partly because—despite what little the trailer has to tell us— the pedigree behind this thing couldn’t be more promising. We’ve got ascendant Scream Queen Maika Monroe, investigating crime scenes with her best solemn Clarice Starling face. And she’s opposite none other than Nicolas Cage, who from the sound of it (he’s mostly off-screen in the clip) is reaching deep into his bag of capital-A actor tics to deliver some truly god-tier voicework.
I know what you’re thinking: won’t Nic Cage, who has inadvertently become more meme than actor, be too distracting in a role we’re meant to take very seriously and fearfully? And to that I’d counter that there’s no working actor alive more committed to inhabiting a character than Cage; whatever he needs to do to become believable, he’s going to overdo it. (Bonus: The cast also features Alicia Witt, the Final Girl in the '90s guilty pleasure trash-classic slasher Urban Legend, in an undisclosed role.)
And then there’s writer-director Osgood Perkins. If anyone should be able to bring the horror-meets-procedural vibes oh-so-back, it’s the son of Norman Bates himself. Perkins already gave us a decent straight-up horror with A24’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter a few years back. And he appears to have leveled up considerably to really try and honor the family legacy with Longlegs.
Again, this is all based off of a trailer that, even at full-length, still manages to divulge next-to-nothing as far as plot details go. And honestly, that’s how I like it. Ominous yellow lighting, misty clearings in the woods, occult symbols sketched in notebooks, a creepy kid or two, Cage delivering bloodcurdling shrieks in the background… this is all it takes to secure my patronage. An Oscar-winning production company spending some of that cultural cachet and goodwill on a good ol fashioned horror thriller is the summer event I didn’t know I needed. Don’t call it elevated horror— just prepare to be disturbed.
Originally Appeared on GQ
