Longlegs (2024)

By: Mike Ward on Thursday, July 18

R Running Time: 101 mins

SHOULD I SEE IT?

YES

Longlegs is an unsettling experience - unnerving, creepy, full of tense, bleak, suffocating atmosphere.
While it may feel like she is holding back, Maika Monroe gives a powerfully understated and memorable performance.
Stabs of humor, sinister subject matter, a wide range of references to movies like Silence of the Lambs, Zodiac, and more make Longlegs not your normal, everyday suspenseful horror film.

NO

The film’s final act, or 15-20 minutes to be more accurate, is full of exposition and explanation, diminishing the trust that writer/director Osgood Perkins places in his audience up to that point.
Some will call it iconic and legendary. Others will find Nicolas Cage’s performance over-the-top and unrestrained. Guess where I fall?
Impossible that Longlegs could live up to the hype. However, it almost delivers on that promise, before snuffing out the intensity and anxiety it creates for two-thirds of the film to finish with a whimper than a stunning conclusion.

OUR REVIEW

Kudos to the marketing team behind NEON’s Longlegs. Friends of mine were genuinely afraid of this movie, largely because of the manner with which NEON withheld key aspects of the plot and images from the film and general details of the storyline. A bleak, disturbing psychological horror film, Longlegs successfully built its buzz organically through social media, brilliant PR, and building hype and anticipation to nearly impossible heights.

On the downside of all that hype, it would be nearly impossible for Longlegs to live up that hype. In fact, this film is far more cerebral than gory, more akin to Silence of the Lambs or Se7en than a garden-variety slasher/serial killer flick. That doesn’t mean writer/director Oz Perkins doesn’t offer a bloody and at times unsettling viewing experience. There are images in the film that will dig into your brain, nestle there, and not depart very easily. The least of which is the actual face reveal of Longlegs, the character, portrayed by a menacing, unhinged Nicolas Cage. More on that in a moment.

Set in Bill Clinton’s America, later identified as 1995 and geographically oriented to rural farming towns in Oregon, Longlegs stars Maika Monroe as FBI agent Lee Harker, a clipped, quiet recruit landing her first big case after a house call turns into tragedy. The result of that event leads her to undergoing a battery of tests that result in establishing her intuitive abilities to anticipate and problem solve complex situations. Brandishing an almost psychic-like quality, Harker is assigned to work on a simmering serial killer file at the request of her superior, grizzled FBI veteran Agent Carter (Blair Underwood).

By the time we reach this point in the film, Perkins has established a grim, foreboding atmosphere. Certain scenes and stretches of this film weigh heavy on your chest, mirroring the stress and tension Harker feels as she dives deeper and deeper into the mystery at hand. As Perkins begins to connect everything, none of this feels good. And it shouldn’t. This is intended to be a tense, shallow breathing exercise in suspense and terror. And for a good long while, Perkins manipulates us like putty in his hands.

He reframes shots, with cinematographer Andres Arochi toying with different aspect ratios to emulate how specific characters remember moments from the past. We are forced to look at things in specific ways, angled up or down to embody a power dynamic or purposefully being kept from seeing something left out of the frame. Part of the constant tension that comes in watching Longlegs is the unpredictability of images we are going to see. Plus, Perkins never gives his film a particular beat or cadence. As a result, we are kept off-kilter and uneasy by his melody of terror playing out-of-rhythm or off-time.

Harker has a strained relationship with her mother (Alicia Witt), which factors into the overall story being told. And Perkins is patient, slowly fitting pieces of his rural mystery together with fascinating discoveries and intricate plot points which hold off spoonfeeding an audience he at least initially trusts to walk with him on this journey.

The film explores themes of religious servitude, occult worship, a devout and implicit trust in others, and explores an overall fear of loneliness. The ease with which we can be possessed and consumed by an ideology is also explored while Perkins spices in numerology, symbols, and other demonic elements to season and heat his film to that of a rolling boil.

But then…Longlegs falls apart with a final act that nearly betrays all the scratchy dread and atmosphere Perkins invests so much time in creating. He makes the near-fatal flaw in delivering a substantial amount of exposition in the film’s climax, removing all the fun and anxiety we have been wrestling with up to that point. Our assumptions are answered. Inexplicably, there is little mystery left.

Even when Longlegs is fully revealed in Cage’s garish and shocking appearance, Perkins gives the actor no notes. He allows Cage to go full carny, delivering a monologue late in the film so verbose and out of step with everything we have seen up to that point, you can just see the foundation Perkins built crumbling into dust right before our eyes.

For a film to explain everything like a television procedural often does after the last commercial break is not only risky but it raises the spotlight too high and leaves us analyzing and asking more questions. For example, I was admittedly so engrossed in the film that I did not realize, until Perkins’ final act of explanation, that we have no real understanding of why Longlegs is the way he is. What is his proclivity for singing 1970s glam rock songs? As a dollmaker who creates mesmerizing dolls that play a significant role in the film, how did he develop the ability to infuse them with qualities that make them so meaningful? Why is he disfigured? What even is his story?

Cage’s histrionics are tempered with Monroe’s striking, halting performance, Witt’s intensity and Underwood’s dogged determination gives us plenty of wonderful performances to chew on. Perkins understands the diabolical nature of his concept: bloody, intense, and unrelenting for two-thirds of its run time, Longlegs is simply dispiriting. Elements of the film are visceral and unforgettable.

But then Perkins lets you up. He dusts you off and makes sure you are okay. And sure, the blood-soaked final scenes in Longlegs are hardly uplifting, but by then - there is little left to discover and no real sense of wonder remaining.

CAST & CREW

Starring: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby, Kieran Shipka, Lauren Acala, Malia Hosie, Jason Day, Lisa Chandler, Carmel Amit, Ava Kelders

Director: Oz Perkins
Written by: Oz Perkins
Release Date: July 12, 2024
NEON

Longlegs is an unsettling experience - unnerving, creepy, full of tense, bleak, suffocating atmosphere.

While it may feel like she is holding back, Maika Monroe gives a powerfully understated and memorable performance.

Stabs of humor, sinister subject matter, a wide range of references to movies like Silence of the Lambs, Zodiac, and more make Longlegs not your normal, everyday suspenseful horror film.

The film’s final act, or 15-20 minutes to be more accurate, is full of exposition and explanation, diminishing the trust that writer/director Osgood Perkins places in his audience up to that point.

Some will call it iconic and legendary. Others will find Nicolas Cage’s performance over-the-top and unrestrained. Guess where I fall?

Impossible that Longlegs could live up to the hype. However, it almost delivers on that promise, before snuffing out the intensity and anxiety it creates for two-thirds of the film to finish with a whimper than a stunning conclusion.