Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Lindsay Traves | Film | July 12, 2024
It promises to be the horror event of the summer, taking us back to ’90s-style criminal investigation horror we long for from David Fincher’s heyday. Longlegs was marketed with creepy verses in a coded alphabet that left fans scrambling with pens and paper (or more likely reddit threads) to decipher the creepy messages like we were Lisbeth Salander getting closer to some terrifying truth. And while, in some ways, it lives up to its promise of residual jitters after cloaking you in atmospheric dread, Longlegs loses itself in an attempt to take Oz Perkins’ more abstract style and tighten it for a more straightforward narrative.
This generation’s scream queen, Maika Monroe, stars as FBI agent Lee Harker. Harker is somewhat of an investigative savant, valuable when paired with her whisper of psychic intuition. Desperate to solve some potentially related murder-suicide cases involving families, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) takes on Harker as an associate, leaving her to find connections between the cases and to track down the mysterious villain known as “Longlegs.” The only thing connecting the gruesome murders seems to be the ciphers left at the crime scenes where a family is found murdered, their patriarch taking his own life. As Harker digs deeper into the connections, she comes closer to Longlegs (Nicholas Cage) who seems to beckon the young agent into the solution.
Writer and director, Perkins, brings his ever-stunning atmospheric horror to this crime-thriller. His earliest, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (the anti-The Holdovers), entombs its tale of horrific young women in an overwhelming sense of bleakness. It’s successful in making the film so grey that it feels physically heavy to observe. Its effectiveness is in resisting spoon-feeding its satisfying conclusion, instead choosing to leave the audience with the feeling of dread, trying to uncover exactly what happened as the credits roll. At the risk of demanding what a movie should have done, or putting Perkins in a box, Longlegs caves to the temptation to wrap its story in a bow, perhaps to appeal to a wider audience. In doing so, the third act gets lost in the exposition sauce, asking more questions than it could possibly answer, and leaving some audience members pondering the logistics instead of reveling in the horrifically bizarre character actions and terrifying imagery.
While Monroe shines in her ability to play awkward and stoic (which blasts off when Harker is frightened), others sometimes feel like they’re in the wrong movie. This specifically applies to Nicolas Cage, who feels woefully misused in the role of the mysterious menace. Cage is capable of a lot, and we’ve seen his more restrained performances in the recent Dream Scenario, for example. But he’s also capable of Cage-ing. Dressing him in unmoving prosthetics and leaving him to be wacky has the backward effect that makes him far less terrifying than the movie that’s built around him. The times when he shines (the cold open made me audibly gasp), he’s supported by the incredible sound design that plays with volume and distorts his voice for a bone-chilling effect. Others seem to be lost, too, Underwood seeming comfortable in the Fincher movie he’s meant to be mirroring, and Alicia Witt appears lost in something completely different.
Longlegs is in many ways a nod to the investigative horror of ’90s yore, nodding to The Silence of the Lambs before diving deep into Fincher’s repertoire. This story isn’t so much a high-concept tale as a straightforward spooky idea cloaked in horrific style and thrown into the world of FBI investigations. It’s a balm for those clamoring for another season of Mindhunter, perhaps, but a disappointment for those looking to cash the checks written by the film’s atmospheric promise.
Longlegs hits theaters July 12, 2024
