Longlegs 4K 2024 2160p WEB-DL

FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is hunting for a maniac nicknamed Longshanks (Nicolas Cage). For more than a decade, his victims have been entire families, whose members mystically killed each other. The closer Agent Harper gets to unraveling the identity of the killer, the clearer he realizes that there is a connection between them.

Longlegs 4K Review
As it happens, it's not A24 that's ruling the horror ball this summer, but Neon, an up-and-coming studio that's won the Cannes Film Festival five times in a row and now has taken over wide distribution. Despite the presence of heavy artillery in the form of “Maxine XXX” retro-stylizer Ty West, “Longlegs” by Hollywood neo-babe Oz Perkins is the most talked-about horror flick of the month.

The formula for the movie's success is simple and straightforward. First, the executive producer of “Soul Collector” was Nicolas Cage, who himself is a walking advertisement for auteuristic horror films. Secondly, for months prior to release, Neon attracted viewers around the world with an intriguing promotional campaign that invited people to solve encrypted messages or chat on the phone with Cage's mysterious character. Despite a lot of info-noise - just quotes from film critics calling Perkins' work “the scariest horror of the decade” - the trailer for “Soul Collector” was surprisingly low-key, with Cage's appearance kept secret until the very last. Unusual promo and conspiracy served the movie well: in the first two weeks of U.S. distribution “Longlegs” was able to recoup the budget twice, reaching the amount of $ 22 million. But did the result satisfy the audience's expectations, which had become exorbitant?

The movie is set in the mid-90s. The main character, FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), discovers psychic abilities. Impressed by superintuition, her superiors attach her to the investigation of a cold case, in which dark forces are clearly involved. Together with Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) Lee follows the trail of a serial killer named Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) - for several decades he has been depriving the inhabitants of American suburbia of peace. Gradually Lee discovers a personal connection with the maniac, the roots of which go back to childhood.

In a large family of horrormakers Oz Perkins - a child unusual, but clearly loved. The most famous works of the director, whether it is “February”, “Gretel and Hansel” or “I'm a beauty living in the house”, are alien to the standard for the genre scrimmers and jumpscares. Imbued with an atmosphere of latent anxiety and lingering melancholy, they are hardly capable of frightening even the most hearty viewer. Perkins prefers the sadistic side of horror to the less spectacular and more verbose metaphor of trauma, and the loud music and fidgety camera movements to the minor tone and smooth poetics of despair. By nature, however, Perkins is not only a lyricist, but also a cinephile, born into a hereditary acting family (the director's father is “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins). Each of his new films flirts with recognizable pop culture artifacts in one way or another, and “Longlegs” is no exception. At first glance, the horror about a talented FBI agent and a hypnotic maniac looks like a tracing of “Silence of the Lambs” with an emphasis on mysticism and the occult. And Perkins himself does not deny this fact. On closer inspection in “Soul Collector” can be found markers of “Zodiac”, “Sinister”, “Twin Peaks”, “Astral” and even “Reincarnation”: the scene involving the interrogation of Cage's character - literally frame-by-frame ommage to the debut of Ari Aster. Woven from disparate plot elements from iconic horror films of recent years, “Longlegs” doesn't surprise with a script and pretends to be a well-promoted bauble most of the time. Following the covenants of the promotional campaign, Perkins leaves all the fun stuff for dessert. The hidden leitmotif about the evil that wraps itself in white robes, about the sacramental sacrifice of motherhood and shattered childhood illusions enters the narrative too late to hook the viewer.

The conspiratorial villain played by Nicolas Cage, without whom “Longlegs” would never have reached such heights of popularity, even when watching it, you have to pick up the pieces: the only scene where he is shown in full height is almost at the finale. The evasive positioning of the antagonist is Perkins' best and simultaneously worst strategy. On the one hand, he manipulates the instinctive fear of the unknown, on the other - all the time avoiding direct contact with the personality of the maniac, revealing his origins. At this emotional distance, even Hannibal Lecter would never have charmed Clarice Starling. The contrived reticence breaks the mythology of the movie, built within the framework of the promotional campaign. In addition, it should be understood that not all viewers have done their “homework” and familiarized themselves with the criminal chronicle of a fictional serial killer. Cage's image turned out to be androgynous - in the best traditions of Brian de Palma's “Razor” - catchy and really creepy.

When asked if the most talked-about horror of this summer is worth watching, it's hard not to give an affirmative answer. However, in the case of “Soul Collector,” one should not expect a genre revelation or a masterpiece for the ages. To the audience's hopes Perkins approaches with atypical for himself ruthlessness, shooting a remarkable, but rather lazy movie about the past, which persistently does not give rest.