Longlegs Review

Viral nurturing will get you nowhere. For all the fantastic social media approaches Longlegs has made over the last few months, it has the style and sleekness of a handholding feature. That much is true for the latest Osgood Perkins movie, and it is a shame it comes to this when the promise is so much more. Think back to the days of Robin Williams being thrown a thriller bone. The same happens here for Nicolas Cage. He has played devious characters before but not to the extent of hiding his appearance until halfway through the movie. Is the payoff worth it? No. Beyond the lacklustre feel running through this horror effort from The Blackcoats Daughter director is a ruminating frustration that true crime podcasts have ripped away the fear of insanity.  

Where Longlegs strives is in its aesthetic. Not in its camerawork, which overstuffs the screen where simple, shot-reverse-shot detail would have worked with powerful implications for what details the film makes sense of, but in its period. Longlegs leans into the procedures of the day. Those overworked agents with all their cliché are a welcome balance to the overextended attempt to bring occult genre trends into a finely tuned serial killer film. We are haunted by our youth and the near-death experiences that come with it, that we tune out of. Sound familiar? Midsommar and Saint Maud did the same. Longlegs has a chance to separate itself from the malaise washing over the otherworldly horrors but buckles up for a safe ride. 

What follows is a misrepresentation of the viral nature which has served the film a larger audience. Nicolas Cage is in expectedly fine form. Those who view him as an over-the-top performance clown know little of the calibre of his style and the neutrality he can bring to the screen. He casts it aside here and makes for a nice slice of out-there flavour in a film dominated by stern talkers. The best part of Longlegs lies in the chemistry between Maika Monroe and Blair Underwood. With the flavour of cop dramas coming to fruition they remain safe hands in the otherwise tacky and try-too-hard world Osgood Perkins creates. He is smart with his camerawork at times, the groundwork of this seen in Gretel & Hansel. Monroe being in the foreground and an expectant audience waiting for the background to bubble up with some new fear never comes, but the implication is stronger than the motion.  

Yet in this strength lies Longlegs’ weakness. To get to those thrills and fascinating elements, Perkins and the cast work overtime to make the needle drops and cheap jumps work. Deliver those and the audience is hooked not through their desire to see out the investigation but to find where the peace begins again. What could have been a straight-shooting investigation turns ropey. Its occult and Satanic implications are neatly folded but it must be expanded for the genre demands more. Longlegs overstretches itself here, collapsing in its third act as it tries to make the most of its shallow parts and make good on the discomfort it has barely earned through those elongated scenes of opening door after door of the familial home.  

Perkins has delved into an overwhelming scenario which pulls on the obvious Zodiac Killer threads. But like those real-world investigations, his threads are tangled and uncomfortably strewn across a bloodied floor. He is not intent on leaving it this way. There is no sense of skill in the story or its conclusion. It does not allude to the paranormal, more rubber stamps it for a conclusion people could have pieced together without the eye roll twists. Messy, messy work. Longlegs does much to convince of its viral hype and in good faith, we head into this latest mangled horror, but out the other end comes not fear but frustration. Not of the context or the plot, but of how it is wrapped up by a director who has banked on the bizarre before. Frustrating, not because of its open-endedness, but because Perkins checks in every ten minutes to make sure we are following along. But by paying attention to whether the audience is in the know, Longlegs fails to keep up with itself.