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    How Osgood Perkins Gave a Jolt to ‘Longlegs’

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    The filmmaker, who is the son of the “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins, discusses horror inspirations, his father’s legacy, evil dolls and working with Nicolas Cage.Many directors fall in love with scary movies through late-night cable binges or with friends at a drive-in. Osgood Perkins had a leg up: His father was the actor Anthony Perkins, a Hollywood heavyweight and the star of “Psycho,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror movie game changer.“My father was absent, more oblique and abstract but a movie star, a public figure, an icon,” said Perkins, 50, in a recent interview over video. “Something very big lived with me.”The younger Perkins said his father, who died of AIDS at 60 in 1992, was a spirit guide as he made his new horror movie “Longlegs,” starring Nicolas Cage as a fiendish clown-looking evildoer who vexes a green F.B.I. agent, played by Maika Monroe, via handmade evil-summoning dolls.What would Perkins’s father have thought of the film, now in theaters?“He probably would have really dug it,” he said.Perkins talked about what inspired “Longlegs” and working with the chameleonic Cage. The interview has been edited and condensed.Perkins, right, on the set of “Longlegs” with his cinematographer, Andres Arochi.Asterios Moutsokapas/Neon, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Longlegs’ Review: Daddy Danger

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      Nicolas Cage plays the cheery evil entity behind multiple murders in this weakly plotted, strongly styled chiller.Any horror movie that opens, as “Longlegs” does, with a quotation from a British glam-rock hit of the 1970s, suggests a filmmaker with, at the very least, an offbeat sensibility. Even so, this latest feature from the abundantly talented writer and director Osgood Perkins is a puzzler: Stuffed to the rafters with serial-killer clichés — coded messages, creepy dolls, satanic symbols, an androgynous maniac — the plot plays like a sampler of many, more coherent precursors. There’s even a minion dressed as a nun.And that’s before we attempt to process Nicolas Cage (who else?) as the titular nut case. His appearances are brief, but resounding — and, as can happen with Cage, waver on the brink of parody. Much like the film itself, righted in part by the magnificently bleak mood and prickling sense of premonition that emerge from Andrés Arochi’s mold-colored images. This man can make a deserted, plastic-draped lair look as ominous as hell’s anteroom.Preparing to enter is Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a rather green F.B.I. agent on the trail of a serial killer who somehow persuades fathers to slaughter their families and then commit suicide. Coded notes, signed “Longlegs,” are left at the crime scenes and law enforcement is stymied. But Lee, who had a disturbing encounter with Longlegs as a child, appears to have a psychic connection with the monster. So, too, does her mother (Alicia Witt), and the two’s haunted, wary relationship thrums with unspoken secrets.Set in Oregon in the 1990s, “Longlegs” wrestles to maintain its eerily menacing tone. The movie’s echoing spaces — a snowy landscape, Lee’s wondrously gloomy home — and wily performances (especially from Kiernan Shipka as an institutionalized survivor of the killings) are too often undercut by a strangely off-kilter comedy. Much of this resides in Longlegs himself, an apparent victim of botched plastic surgery whom Cage plays as a rhyming-and-singing lunatic beneath a frizzed gray wig. In one amusing scene, as Longlegs enters a hardware store sporting what appear to be slippers and a housedress, he resembles nothing so much as a bizarre amalgam of Buffalo Bill and Tootsie. He should have been a breeze to catch.Scenes like this one (which benefits from a dry cameo by the director’s daughter, Bea Perkins, as a spectacularly unfazed clerk), in common with random moments throughout the movie, have a dottiness that seems intentional and suggests that Perkins might be messing with us. As chilling and stylish as it is, “Longlegs” is a frustrating pleasure. In films like “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House” (2016) and “The Blackcoats Daughter” (2017), Perkins allowed his gift for ominousness and insinuation to take center stage. Here, we’re never quite sure if his tongue is in his cheek or his hand is on his heart.LonglegsRated R for malevolence, madness and mass murder. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Stranger’ Review: Somewhere Over the Freeway

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      In this tense thriller on Hulu, Maika Monroe plays Clare, a Kansas transplant in Los Angeles who parallels Dorothy in Oz.“The Stranger” is a tense if tidy thriller that chronicles a ride-hail driver’s journey to surveillance hell and back. Her survival against all odds mirrors that of the movie itself: The film’s footage originally premiered in 13 short-form episodes in 2020 on the streaming service Quibi, several months before it shut down.The recut version (on Hulu) bears little trace of its earlier form, although its life span across algorithm-driven streaming companies does cast the villain’s tech preoccupations — “whoever figures out the mathematical formula determining the losers and the winners in life will rule” the world, he declares — in a new, meta light.Written and directed by Veena Sud (“The Killing”), the film follows Clare (Maika Monroe), a recent transplant to Los Angeles who falls into a freeway nightmare after her ride-hail passenger, Carl (Dane DeHaan), identifies himself as a serial killer. He claims he will murder her unless she tells him a good story.If this opening sounds cliché, the film at least seems aware of the pitfalls. Sud creates parallels between Clare in Hollywood and Dorothy in Oz, assigning Clare a Kansan back story, a yapping terrier and a guileless attitude. And DeHaan embodies the tech-savvy Carl as a pasty, smirking male chauvinist who is sillier than he is scary.It follows as something of a surprise, when, over the course of the second act, the film builds to a deeply agitated mood. Sud pulls off the tonal shift by keeping Carl largely offscreen; his looming absence, alongside Monroe’s knack for portraying paranoia, simmers with menace.The StrangerNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘God Is a Bullet’ Review: Cult, but Not Classic

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      A kidnapping cult regrets making off with a detective’s daughter in this wearyingly unsavory movie.I didn’t count the number of times a woman’s face is smashed — by a fist, a boot, a brick wall — in “God Is a Bullet,” Nick Cassavetes’s first feature in almost a decade. But the misogyny of the movie’s risibly sadistic villains is only one distasteful thread in this sleazy saga of rescue and revenge.Adapted by Cassavetes from Boston Teran’s 1999 novel of the same name, the plot centers on Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a mild-mannered detective, as he searches for the child-trafficking cult that has murdered his ex-wife and abducted his daughter. Impassive behind a despairing mustache, Bob welcomes the foulmouthed assistance of Case (Maika Monroe), a battle-hardened cult escapee. Case possesses intimate knowledge of the gang’s degenerate leader, Cyrus (a crazy-eyed Karl Glusman), for whom she has sacrificed several teeth and most of her self-respect.The searchers don’t have much of a plan, drifting through the dim rooms and dusty outposts where Cyrus and his acolytes might be found. Jamie Foxx, inexplicably named The Ferryman, is around to provide Bob with tattoos and ammunition, and an almost unrecognizable January Jones appears briefly as a sneering drunk whose pertinence remains vague — at least to anyone as numbed by the film’s viciousness as I was.Coming in at an interminable 155 minutes, “God Is a Bullet” has a punishing implacability. The acting is workmanlike, the settings are often ugly and the special effects — especially a grisly stomach-stapling — can only be described as strenuously specific. For Cassavetes, this may be as far from “The Notebook” as he is ever likely to get.God Is a BulletNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Significant Other’ Review: Backpacking Is a Trip

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      Jake Lacy and Maika Monroe play a camping couple in this slick thriller that uses its modest facade as a smoke screen.Backpacking as a couple is already a trust exercise, but in the slick thriller “Significant Other,” that exercise escalates into a triathlon of psychic fitness. The film’s modest facade proves a smoke screen for a rich and eventful ride; one plot development in particular hits with such surprise that it catches the audience far more unawares than the characters.Harry (Jake Lacy) and Ruth (Maika Monroe) have been together for six years when they embark on a backcountry camping trip. Ruth struggles with panic attacks, and the excursion, as well as the romantic obligation it implies, are triggers for her anxiety. We accompany the twosome through dense thickets, and some clunky dialogue, ornamented with ominous portents. Then a startling twist zags the film into unknown territory.Lacy often plays a teddy bear; filmmakers have only recently begun to cash in on his potential to act against type. Here, he commits to an erratic role laced with humor, and the writer-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen milk Lacy’s grinning veneer for every comic drop. No stranger to chills and thrills, Monroe has a heavier assignment: For audiences to buy into the movie’s phenomena, her performance must contain several contradictory layers of meaning.Monroe’s solution is to act with subtlety, and Berk and Olsen balance this muted central character with some visual flair, such as a trembling close-up shot that mirrors Ruth’s shakiness during moments of panic. “Significant Other” does not reinvent the genre, but its narrative flourishes make for an exciting outing.Significant OtherRated R for gore and gorpcore. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More