Longlegs: deep chills, shallow cinema

Still courtesy of Rialoto Distribution

George reviews the “best horror movie of the year”

Longlegs is the marketing phenomenon of 2024. The movie backs it up, only for the first 30 minutes. Visually very inventive and quite slickly edited, bone-chilling frames force the audience to question what they perceive on screen. Hard cuts and disappearing items in the background create beautifully subtle moments, unnerving to a point where we begin to reckon with the director’s clear control of the craft.

Director Osgood Perkins, son of actor Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates from Psycho) and photographer Berry Berenson, understands the craft better than many of his contemporaries. The extreme stillness of his gaze in Longlegs brings an almost Kubrickian sensibility to the screen, much like the frames of Todd Field’s TÁR. The unflinching images made me understand early reactions to the film’s expressions of true evil.

However, Longlegs loses its footing after the first act. Its brilliance fades and what is left is a reasonably effective horror/mystery procedural. It evokes what’s already been. Twin Peaks, Silence of the Lambs and, more recently, James Wan’s Conjuring series have done much of the cultural heavy-lifting on blending horror, crime and mystery. Yet, as the horror genre begins to become the mainstay of the majority of young independent filmmakers of the 10s and 20s, it occurs to me that originality is drying out. Paul Schrader, a great champion of shock value cinema as both critic and contributor, commented on the recent Longlegs hype and its place in the current cinematic landscape, “Osgood is a talented director but, like TiWest, is confined by the horror genre ghetto. What is it about independent film that talented young filmmakers can only find financing and distribution in the horror genre?”

Longlegs establishes itself both in its prologue and in its marketing as an intended alternative item in horror cinema. And yet, it shoots itself in the foot with extremely predictable plotting that destroys the scariest thing the film has to offer: mystery. Mystery in horror is a vital asset, leaving the audience in the dark with their imagination and provocative imagery, building on fears and an entire spectrum of emotion that only cinema can produce. But, as the plot unravels and all cards are shown, the dopamine of satisfaction and resolution dissolves tensions.

Attempting to spoil as little as possible, one performance stands out most prominently: Nicholas Cage as the titular Longlegs. Significant makeup work is deeply shocking and undeniably conmpensating performance-wise. The more Cage as the demonic man-creature is shown to the audience, classic Cage-isms emerge to provide moments more humorous than chilling. “Get all the way doowwwwwnnn, dowwwwwwn, to the dirty dirty work…”

Maika Monroe is serviceably nervy as the film’s protagonist FBI agent Lee Harker and provides a quality audience avatar to a grim underworld of satanism. Satan was name-dropped a couple of too many times and, frankly, Satanism is just not that scary anymore.

Overall, the picture’s genre convention ultimately restricts the dimensions for the film’s thrills. Perkins hopefully can follow through on his more experimental impulses in future projects, which I am excited to see. Longlegs, however, is still worth a watch.