Halloween Horror: Longlegs (2024)

Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs was marketed as “the scariest movie of the decade.” I applaud the marketing, if not the film. However, the movie is something of a useful bookend for this late period of Elevated Horror, in which directors dress up their horror movies in the trappings of prestige cinema. Longlegs shows how much this specific generic approach has run out of steam.

To be fair, Longlegs is competently made from a technical perspective. It has a chilly, sterile atmosphere, with low angles, centre-framing, and lots of headroom above characters on screen. It allows our eye to wander the frame in search of scares, using the precision and stillness to amplify the chill. It’s stylistically serious and takes evil seriously, which is refreshing among Elevated Horror movies that often reduce everything to metaphor. If only it were scary, and if only the plot were more than a mishmash of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure.

Longlegs follows a new FBI recruit, Maika Monroe’s Lee Harker (she might as well be called Clarice Starling), who in her first official duties as an FBI Special Agent joins the case of a serial killer known as Longlegs. Longlegs’ victims seem to dispatch themselves through murder suicides, but no one is sure quite how he does it (Cure, anyone?). Lee’s own past, including her strained relationship with her religious and reclusive mother (Alicia Witt), might have a possible answer.

The movie is paradoxically both narratively inert and convoluted. The investigation plays out in the most straightforward manner possible—Lee goes from one location to another, easily uncovers clues, but doesn’t find Longlegs—while also having tortured twists and revelations about Satanism and clairvoyance and interconnections between characters.

At the film’s centre—instead of a hyper-refined Anthony Hopkins—is Nicolas Cage as the mad-man serial killer with a penchant for Satanic symbology and creepy dolls. In recent years, Cage hasn’t been known for reining it in, but even by his standards, his performance as Longlegs is unhinged. Caked in ghostly white make-up (a reference to Cage’s own western kabuki, perhaps?), sporting a ratty, long white wig, and speaking in an affected, soft lift, Cage looks and acts like a cartoon character. The choice to costume Longlegs this way is baffling. It’s not so much that Cage is bad but rather that he’s bad for this film, which tries so very hard to be serious, and yet, incomprehensibly, has a comically-absurd clown as the villain at its centre. Perkins’ shaky script and considered visual approach cannot withstand the tonal dissonance.

The end result is derivative and goofy rather than scary. Others claim it’s bone-chilling, so who am I to argue with them? Scares are often subjective, so we can leave them aside. What I take issue with is that the film that tries to accomplish these scares is so alarmingly lacklustre, tonally inconsistent, and passively dramatized. It’s mostly a chore and a bore, rather than a terror I’ll remember for years to come as was advertised.

4 out of 10

Longlegs (2024, USA)

Written and directed by Osgood Perkins; starring Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby, Kiernan Shipka.

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