The Many Disappointments of Longlegs
The horror genre has been experiencing a slump lately, with many commercial misfires causing some to question its reliability. The promise of Longlegs, a nightmarish killer thriller, had us hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel. Teased with an intricate campaign, early reactions suggested a bold and terrifying new original. Unfortunately, the final product fails to deliver on its promise.
The film’s atmosphere is its strongest aspect.
Writer-director Osgood Perkins, son of Psycho’s Anthony, has a preference for style over substance, which is evident in his work. From 2015’s underwritten debut The Blackcoat’s Daughter to his thin yet visually effective take on Hansel and Gretel, Perkins’ films are heavy on atmosphere and light on everything else. Longlegs follows suit, with a stylish yet progressively silly horror that can’t quite live up to its ambitions.
The film’s setup is intriguing, with a young FBI agent called Lee (Maika Monroe) on the hunt for a serial killer known as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). The case is a confounding mystery, clouded by details that don’t add up and an unknown link that Lee herself seems to have to the case. When Perkins keeps us in the dark, similar to the ads that preceded the film, Longlegs has us in its grip, even if mostly through technique.
The actor’s performance is sadly disappointing.
However, the big reveal of Cage’s killer crash-lands and any intrigue or even vague belief in the world that Perkins has created evaporates. The actor, who has enthusiastically embraced his self-parody era, has been disguised with ridiculous prosthetics and performs with outsized excess that it’s impossible to see anything but an actor in a costume. Given how quiet and grounded the film mostly is, set in rural Americana and cold FBI boardrooms, it makes Cage’s performance that much harder to stomach.
As the film descends into baffling hokum, with a stream of nonsense that gets sillier by the second, it becomes clear that Perkins is a far more equipped and inventive director than he is a writer. The dialogue is clunky and awkward, plot holes are obvious and lazy, and crucially, none of it is scary. Those fleeting moments of creepiness are nowhere to be found in the disastrous last act, and what started to burrow under our skin in the outset ends up flying far away from us by the end.
Longlegs is a missed opportunity, and for all its attempts to pierce our sleep and make its way into our nightmares, nothing sticks. Perkins achieves two visceral shocks, but nothing achieves that pit-of-your-stomach fear that truly lingers. In trying too hard in the moment, Longlegs is awfully shortsighted.
The film’s horror elements are underutilized.
Ultimately, Longlegs is a generic horror film that fails to deliver on its promise. Even Nicolas Cage, who has made a career out of being delightfully unhinged, is pitifully disappointing here. For a cursed horror film about family annihilation that really scares, you’re better off with 2001’s Session 9.
