Movie Review: Longlegs

Longlegs is probably the horror movie release I’ve heard more about than any other this year.

For better and for worse – Osgood Perkins’ most recent directorial effort, starring Maika Monroe and Nicholas Cage, has been running the gamut of critical and audience responses. It’s the scariest film ever made! It’s an overrated piece of shit! It’s ground-breaking! It should be buried in a pit with Hitchcock’s lost movie and forgotten about for good! etc, etc.

And these kinds of movies always interest me, because it’s fascinating to figure out what has caused these intense reactions, one way or another. And, now that I’ve finally seen Longlegs, I can safely say that I…don’t really get it.

Not to say that I think these reactions are fake or staged or anything like that, but rather Longlegs left me surprisingly cold. As cold as the case FBI special agent Lee Harker (Monroe) is tasked to in this very movie, of a mysterious serial killer known as Longlegs (Cage). Was that a good segue? Probably not. Anyway, let’s talk about the film!

There’s plenty to like about Longlegs, though most of it feels skimmed from the surface of other great genre fiction in a similar vein – Twin Peaks, Silence of the Lambs, a healthy dose of Hitchcock, The X-Files, to name but a few. Perkins does a really solid job with the direction, creating sumptuously-rich shots full of lurking empty space, and cinematographer Andrés Arochi deserves more credit for his skill in these long, handsome panoramic shots. Monroe, who I’ve found a bit flat in other movies, is really strong here, her slightly robotic affect put to good use as Lee (apart from some bizarre third-act script choices that make her look surprisingly alright with allowing people to get very preventably murdered), and her mother, played by Alicia Witt, is the standout of the whole piece, finding an eerie disaffection that lends her scenes an odd, otherworldly tone.

One of the biggest talking points of this movie is, of course, Nicholas Cage as the titular Longlegs. And, look, Cage gives the exact performance that you’d imagine he would – it’s big, shouty, gurning, and might have been interesting if it had come from anyone other than Cage, but with his long history of doing…well, exactly this, it’s hard to find it very exciting. Is it bad? No. He’s doing what he needs to do, and doing it with obvious commitment. But it’s also not particularly compelling to me. It’s a guy in a funny wig and bad make-up shouting T-Rex lyrics, and Marc Bolan already exists, you know?

And Cage’s performance really captures my main problem with Longlegs as a whole, which is this self-conscious attempt at strangeness that runs through the whole piece. So much of Longlegs feels like a concentrated attempt to convey a sense of oddness in ways that I found almost embarrassingly ineffective – deliberately weird choices that clearly serve no other purpose than to make the film feel cuh-razy, guys, trust me. The worst offender is a scene featuring Kiernan Shipka, who gets cursed with some of the most abjectly clunky dialogue that feels more like creepypasta that creepy-prestige, but there’s more to it than just that. For all Longlegs seems to want to be edgy, with the violence against children and heavy gore, it doesn’t do anything that bold in terms of storytelling – a guy who Looks a Bit Funny and Talks Weird isn’t exactly blowing the doors off the genre in terms of a villain, and the reliance on the overdone, vaguely puritanical Satanism trope to drive the plot’s main engine was so tropey I kept waiting for something to subvert it.

It’s hard not to compare it to the genre fiction it shares so much with – to something like Cure, by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, another procedural horror, but one that just oozes an effortless strangeness with a deft use of cinematic language, rather than making the characters talk like a malfunctioning AI for no real reason or rely on crazy make-up to convince of a character’s wrongness. It’s hard to get engrossed in a film that won’t stop grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you and yelling “look at how fucking weird I am!” when it’s actually relatively cheap in its subversion – much like me in high school, now I think of it.

Longlegs isn’t a bad film, by any stretch – in fact, there’s a lot to like here, and I can totally see why some people have fallen in love with it the way they have. But, for me, it gets lost to a self-conscious attempt at strangeness, of which Cage’s performance is emblematic, that made it hard to fully immerse myself in this story and world.

What did you think of Longlegs? Are you a lover, hater, or meh-er? Let me know in the comments!

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By Lou MacGregor

(header image via GeekTyrant)