For a film as cold and icy as Longlegs is, the world really ran a fever for it in the heat of a climate-change ridden summer. The crime horror film from Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), financed independently at C2 Motion Picture Group for less than $10 million, went on to gross more than $100 million globally at the box office, and became distributor NEON’s biggest US release to date, outgrossing their Best Picture winner Parasite, which held the title for nearly half-a-decade. No doubt the success came from the almost overwhelming pre-release hype for the film, as well as NEON’s simply brilliant marketing campaign which struck the highly sought after balance between magnetism and vagueness, never giving away the ghost in any of their trailers, giving audiences an actual reason to venture out to the theater to see what it is they’re not being shown (a tactic that I also think worked wonders for Coralie Fargeat’s recently-released The Substance, which might not have opened to as much of a splash, but for distributor MUBI’s standards, was a runaway success). Despite a few “It’s not that scary” responses to the hype, Longlegs was a massive win for Perkins, NEON, and viewers alike, and remains one of my favorite films to bow in 2024 so far. Now, Decal Releasing is bringing Longlegs home on DVD, Blu-ray (detailed in this review), and 4K Blu-ray.
L-R: Cinematographer Andres Arochi and director Osgood Perkins on the set of Osgood Perkins’ LONGLEGS. Photo courtesy of NEON.
A plot synopsis sourced from my July theatrical review of Longlegs:
“Oregon, the 1990s. FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), after displaying rock solid intuition on a previous murder case, is taken in by her superior, Carter (Blair Underwood), and thrust upon the unbreakable case that has plagued their small Oregon town for decades: The Longlegs Killer (Nicolas Cage). Longlegs’s involvement in the crimes is unknown as the only leads are a series of coded messages left at the homes of brutal family murder-suicides by the fathers of little girls born on the 14th of the month. As Harker’s unique intuition opens up doors yet unopened in the case, she faces the looming inevitability of coming face-to-face with the elusive killer and the insidious powers that be fueling the murders.”
If you’re interested in a spoiler-free perspective of the film, head over to EoM Senior Critic Hunter Heilman’s theatrical release review.
Maika Monroe as FBI Special Agent Lee Harker in Osgood Perkins’ LONGLEGS. Photo courtesy of NEON.
I’m not really going to go over what I thought of the film itself, as I did with my theatrical review, and my views on the film have not changed. I still find it to be a masterfully crafted, pit-in-your-stomach, dread-soaked throwback to the days of Satanic Panic, and the question of “What if all of those insanely fake stories about satanism in small towns was true? What would that actually look like?” Taking something so ridiculously so seriously creates a dissonance that shouldn’t work, but Perkins’s ability to quietly unnerve audiences with the dense, cold atmospheres of his films makes him the perfect candidate to take something that could have skewed incredibly silly and inject some genuinely affecting chills into it all. It’s definitely Perkins’s most accessible film to date (even counting his studio-produced Gretel & Hansel (2020), which is seriously underrated), but that doesn’t mean that a single drop of his ability to disturb and disquiet is lost.
Maika Monroe as FBI Special Agent Lee Harker in Osgood Perkins’ LONGLEGS. Photo courtesy of NEON.
As for Decal’s Blu-ray release for Longlegs, they’ve done something that will be beneficial to most viewers, and infuriating to a very small amount of people viewing the film in a certain way. While the film contains multiple aspect ratios, mainly switching between 2.35:1 and 1.33:1 depending on the time period the film is depicting, the film was formatted to be projected with a 2.35:1 mask. For the home media release, the film maintains all of the correct aspect ratios, but does not squeeze the 1.33:1 sequences within the borders of the 2.35:1 image, opting to take up all the vertical space it can on a standard 1.78:1 widescreen television screen. This opens these sequences up for more detail to be examined, and, for almost everyone viewing the film on a television, or an unmasked projector screen, it’s the ideal formatting, and makes the film look and feel far more consistent throughout. For those with a maskable projection screen looking to project the film the way it would have been in theaters, you’re out of luck, and, unfortunately, will have to view the film with black bars either on the top and bottom or the sides of the screen at all times. It’s a very small, but very vocal, group of consumers affected by this, and it’s not dissimilar to the misgivings about films shot with IMAX cameras using multiple aspect ratios in their home media releases. It’s something to consider, but for 99% of viewers, this will be a welcome change to the entire experience.
Blair Underwood as FBI Special Agent Carter in Osgood Perkins’ LONGLEGS. Photo courtesy of NEON.
As for actual video quality, there’s not much to really complain about here beyond Longlegs not being that much of a stereotypical “looker” to begin with. Shot on a combination of digital for the scenes in the 1990s and 35 mm for the flashback sequences in 1.33:1, there is a noticeable difference in grain quality in each image that corresponds really effectively for the tones in each of the respective timelines. Because of the film’s general coldness, there isn’t a ton of richness being struck in the film’s 35 mm segments, which gives the rustic feeling in these pieces much more gravity, making things feel much more exposed, more vulnerable, and somehow grounding the events of the film, while simultaneously stylizing them. Conversely, the 2.35:1 digital sequences set in the 1990s give the film an occasionally warmer, but very dreamlike quality to its scenes (rather fittingly given some of the third act reveals) which feel as ethereal as they are utterly horrifying. It’s a faithful, and very effective, 1080 p transfer. Nothing, even 4K HDR, could really make Longlegs a demo disc for your home theater system, but a solid transfer is all that matters, and this delivers.
Maika Monroe as FBI Special Agent Lee Harker in Osgood Perkins’ LONGLEGS. Photo courtesy of NEON.
Both the 1080 p and 4K Blu-ray releases for Longlegs feature the same DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio mixes, that, like the video transfer, isn’t a showstopper, but does exactly what it needs to do exactly how it needs to do it. Even by horror standards, this isn’t a particularly bombastic mix, with a smattering of occasional atmospherics, and some really good subwoofer work with Elvis Perkins’s (brother of Osgood) (The Blackcoat’s Daughter) aggressively brutal score to fill the space nicely. It’s still a mostly front-and-center audio mix, which really justifies why Decal opted to go for a simple 5.1 mix, as even I feel like a full Dolby Atmos or DTS:X mix for this film would’ve been overkill.
L-R: Actor Blair Underwood, director Osgood Perkins, and actor Maika Monroe on the set of Osgood Perkins’ LONGLEGS. Photo courtesy of NEON.
Since establishing Decal Releasing with Bleecker Street, NEON’s Blu-ray releases have been much more hit-or-miss when it comes to its A/V quality than their previous distributor, Universal, but one thing I have really appreciated with the company is that their releases have contained far more special features than any of Universal’s releases ever did, if they even has any at all. While Longlegs’s offerings aren’t robust by any real stretch of the imagination, they’re still a welcome touch to the release, and a rare release that appreciates the art of the commentary track, something that even some stacked releases neglect these days. The full suite of special features on Longlegs is as follows:
- Audio commentary with writer/director Osgood Perkins
- On-set interviews with cast and crew
- Featurettes:
- The Clue
- The Evidence
- Dirty + Sweet
- Original trailer
- Original teaser trailer
From the perspective of this horror fan, Longlegs really came at the perfect time. Amidst a sea of competent, but fairground haunted house-esque horror films of the first half of the year, there was a swift punch in the chest needed with a true feel-bad, stomach-churning horror film that sought to scare audiences before seeking to merely entertain them. Its home media release, while not mind-blowing in either its A/V transfer or its suite of special features, does its job more competently than most films with more punch, and more behind-the-scenes potential to justify a fully stocked Blu-ray release. Many comparisons have been made of this film (including the pull quote on the Blu-ray’s cover) to Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), but I’d almost argue there’s more in line with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997) than anything else, not in narrative strands, but in pure atmosphere. It’s the type of horror that has you staring at your ceiling, not fearing the violence of the film or that of Nicolas Cage’s excellent performance as the titular character, but for the existential implications that come from a film like this. It asks questions that it knows it can’t answer, and if you can take those questions with you into your everyday life, unable to shake them, then a job has been well done.
Available on digital August 23rd, 2024.
Available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray September 24th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official NEON Longlegs website.
Share this:
Categories: Films To Watch, Home Release, Recommendation
Leave a Reply