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Rev Horror

Longlegs

Dir. Osgood Perkins (2024)

An FBI agent pursues a Satanic serial killer who preys on families with children born on a certain day of the month.


When a movie is billed as the "scariest film of the decade," you can rest assured that it's going to be one of two things: either it is, in fact, going to be the scariest movie you've seen in a long time (Hereditary) or it's going to be a massive letdown (almost literally anything else that promoted itself that way). Longlegs, the new film from director Oz Perkins, manages to avoid the trap of some of its predecessors by giving us a film that is legitimately creepy as hell. It does, however, fall far short of living up to its hype, delivering a film that falls apart in its deliberately separate third act in becoming a Lynchian smorgasbord of twists and exposition that loses a lot of the steam built in the first two thirds of the film.


Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is new to the FBI and has been assigned to track down a killer. After she gets a "hunch" that he may be lurking inside a specific building, she is placed onto a different task force trying to hunt down Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), a serial family murderer who has been operating for the last couple of decades. He kills families whose child is born on the 14th of the month, but the families are always actually murdered by someone in the family rather than by Longlegs himself. As Harker looks into her own past to find clues to reveal the killer's identity and motives, she is thrust into a world of Satanic worship and control, eventually forced to investigate the experience that she and her mother (Alicia Witt) went through when she was a child.

Make no mistake about it: Longlegs is creepy as fuck. Perkins does a great job of establishing an ambience of fear, cutting more quickly than expected at times and lingering longer in others, throwing the audience off balance and ratcheting tension throughout. Cage is masterful, and while the overall film might not rank up there among the scariest, Cage's Longlegs very well might. He's utterly terrifying, especially in the first half of the film, though he does become a bit cartoonish in the third act (along with the rest of the film). The whole concept of the film, that of families that kill themselves at the guidance of a Satan-worshipping serial killer, is horrific, part Manson and part pseudo-hypnotism. Unfortunately, that is largely where the compliments to the film ends.

Monroe does a decent job in the film, though her stilted performance, while purposeful, isn't particularly engaging. Witt, who plays her mother in the film, is likewise adequate. Neither of them break the mold, though, and the film leans far too heavily into the limited screentime of Cage in order to bring the vast majority of the scares. The violence in the film is mostly offscreen, and even when its not it seems like an afterthought. Perkins' Silence of the Lambs influence is impossible to deny, though it lacks a lot of the punch that would have been necessary to live up to that Oscar-caliber film. Likewise, there's a good bit of Fincher's Zodiac in her as well. Longlegs is 90% style and 10% overly confusing substance, and while the style is well worth buying a ticket, the substance is not nearly good enough to carry the rest of the film.

I haven't been a fan of Oz Perkins up this point, and in fact actively hated The Blackcoat's Daughter and its ridiculously twisty ending. Despite his ability to craft a film with an unnerving atmosphere and some eerie characters, Perkins doesn't appear to have the storytelling chops to tell a complete tale in his films. That's to take nothing away from him, and he's clearly a talented filmmaker. It's the story itself that has been lacking so far, though if he can latch onto an idea with a fully formed narrative, he may well be able to knock it out of the park. Unfortunately, for all its hype, Longlegs isn't it. It's a shame, because Cage had a chance to deliver a truly legendary performance, and he's largely let down by the rest of the film around him. All that said, the first ten minutes of this movie are terrifying as hell, and that alone is worth the price of admission.


Who this movie is for: Psychological horror lovers, Silence of the Lambs fans, Tall people


Bottom line: Longlegs is a largely disappointing film with an incredibly harrowing opening. Unfortunately, most of the creep factor that the first 2/3 of the film establishes is squandering in the closing act, wasting a fantastic performance from Nicolas Cage and an at-least-adequate one from Maika Monroe. While you may not find a movie that will resonate as much as it promises, it's still a well-made film with some stellar scares and some shocking moments. Just don't be expecting to receive what the early reviews promise.



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