REVIEW: 'Longlegs' is terror worth your patience
Director Osgood Perkins has made a career out of confounding, almost frustratingly glacial paced movies—and Longlegs is no different.
His new horror movie starring Maika Monroe as morose and put upon FBI agent Lee Harker and a nearly unrecognizable Nicolas Cage as the titular serial killer has a setup so very shambolic that you can be forgiven for walking out as the first half of the movie’s running time unfolds.
Trust that your patience and all your whys will be rewarded in the third act. This psychological horror thriller has such ancient—and yes, thrilling—delights to show you that all the dissonant, jagged story chords will somehow manage to come together into a symphony full of melodic dread.
The setup is all too familiar for a serial killer chase. Lee Harker (Monroe) is a froshie FBI agent sans “special” to her title and is assigned to her first serial killer case with links to the occult. As in, this guy is a good ole Satan worshipping slasher.
On a routine inspection of the suspect’s house, Harker intuits that it is in fact this other house across the street they should check out. Turns out she was right and they bag the suspect. Her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), casually chides that “Half-psychic is better than no psychic at all.”
What’s unusual about this case though is that the killer leads to another new one that has, surprise, a connection to Harker’s personal history.
This killer is the main suspect in a string of family murders that take place for a duration of almost 30 years, centered on a custom, nearly life-sized doll that eerily resembles the daughter in the family. Always there is a daughter in the family with a birthday that falls on the fourteenth. Add to that that there’s no physical evidence of the killer being at the crime scene at all. Just the doll.
The calling card of this slasher are messages written in a cipher and signed LONGLEGS at the end. From this jumping point, Longlegs versus Agent Harker’s chase commences in earnest.
With devilish use of jump scares, sound design, surreal images seemingly out of nowhere, and the performances of (mainly) Monroe and Cage, my interest was sustained through the molasses strides of the first two acts.
Perhaps it’s my familiarity with Perkins’ pervious work that kept me put in my chair? Though I confess I got a buko slushie midway to keep me engaged. There are clear precedents in Gretel and Hansel, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, and more aptly I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House for his choice of pacing and atmosphere building. All those led me to believe there would be ample payoff for all this seeming nonsense.
Driven by a clever marketing campaign and critical hype, Cage is unsurprisingly over the top in his thespian portrayal of Dale Cobble aka Longlegs. Nobody casts him for subtlety, even in slapstick horror comedy—see Renfield. Unrecognizable in prosthetics that deform his face, he’s confessed in interviews that he based Longlegs on his mother ala Norman Bates.
Harker herself, so lacking in confidence that she rarely meets her boss’s eye during briefings, is no ambitious Clarice Starling. But she does use her bureau training and gut feel to track down someone who looks like he is way too many steps ahead of her. Monroe can be such an underdog even with her superb acting in It Follows, but Perkins makes good use of her shaking lips and ability to shed a tear on cue as the boggled yet intrigued Harker.
Even with Monroe and Cage’s performances, this is not a horror movie for the impatient. Neither is it for those hungry that the movie hit conventional tropes—though there's plenty of those even in the red herring scares.
I found that there were some genuinely spooky moments that later on reveal context and clarity. But until that denouement comes you can bet that there will be people in the theater pulling out their phones and scrolling through TikTok. There were three young women sitting in front of me who were doing exactly that. But by the last 30 minutes, things had turned into a bloody tapestry of generational violence with Satanic worship, hedge magic folklore, and serial killer mythos that the three went from bored giggles and gasps at the occasional jump scares, to a quiet esteem that led to genuine yawps. Their disgust gave way to odium, the spooks gave way to dread as almost every previous stray thread and detail was explained and the masterplan unveiled.
To even hint about that masterplan would be to spoil too much.
Bottomline, Longlegs is definitely a flawed and imperfect movie. Something casual horror viewers or even some hardcores who simply don’t like this kind of atmospheric sub-genre can—and should—shelf one for the inevitable streaming release.
What it is though is an outstanding candidate for a modern cult favorite. As it is mine. Personally, I think it ranks up there with Talk to Me and The Witch for their visceral ending.
Bring your patience and watch it in the theater for anyone who likes grand gestures on an equally big platform.
Longlegs opens in Philippine cinemas on July 10. Watch the trailer below.