Hallmark Is Harboring Thespians
Respectfully, I wasn't all that affected by Nicolas Cage's performance in Longlegs. Alicia Witt, on the other hand, will haunt me until the end of time. Or, until I put on one of her Hallmark Christmas movies.
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Warning: This blog contains spoilers for Longlegs.
Not since Scream has a seemingly innocuous question (“Do you like scary movies?”) ever sounded so sinister. Then, in crept Longlegs, Osgood Perkins’ new—and already acclaimed—procedural that follows an FBI agent’s pursuit of a Satanic serial killer only to learn that in this case, one seven-headed and 10-horned beast begets another. Anchored by an ensemble cast that includes this generation’s definitive scream queen, Maika Monroe as Agent Lee Harker and Nicolas Cage as the titular specter, Longlegs has been compared to Silence of the Lambs and deemed the “scariest film of the year.”
Is it? So far, yes–at least where wide releases are concerned. But if I’m being honest, it wasn’t Cage’s glam rock “gross old guy” from hell that I found most horrifying. In fact, there were moments I found Cage to be anything but. Instead, it’s Alicia Witt as Harker’s mother, Ruth, who’s the absolute revelation here—and by revelation I mean Revelation 13:1, specifically.
“Are you still saying your prayers?” Ruth asks her adult daughter in her decaying childhood home at the film’s halfway point. As the audience gets its first glimpse at Harker’s reclusive, religious mother, the agent is on the precipice of discovering Longlegs’ horrific motivations behind his decade-spanning familial decimation and, more importantly, that he couldn’t possibly have carried out all of these murders by himself. Maybe it’s her hollow—ever-so-slightly menacing—expression or, the fact that my dad still asks me the same question from time to time though the answer is always no, but Ruth’s inquiry in the middle of it all is downright disquieting.