Note: the review itself will be spoiler free and will only discuss a very general plot outline. It will also mention who appears in the movie so if you wish to be surprised by that, don’t read the review. In the comments, if you discuss spoilers, please tag them in some way!
What does it mean to protect someone? Or yourself? What are the consequences of repression and denial? What is the difference between supernatural evil and human evil?
Longlegs explores many themes, but 24 hours after seeing it, these are the themes that hit me hardest. They are themes that I’ll be thinking about for days to come, while the general feeling of Longlegs will, I think, sit with me for much longer.
This movie has been getting a lot of comparisons to Silence of the Lambs. This isn’t at all surprising considering the plot, which I’ll share the very bare bones of. A female FBI agent in the 90s is tracking a serial killer. We know her childhood was dark and disturbing but we don’t know how or why. The killer likes to leave clues, and she is particularly skilled at unravelling them. In this way it also earns the comparisons it got to Zodiac, and a friend made an apt comparison to Phantasm, but I’ll leave that discussion for the spoilers. What reminded me most of Silence of the Lambs wasn’t the plot, though, it was the feel of Longlegs.
In the very first scene, Longlegs sets the viewer up with a rhythm it will repeat throughout: a false sense of security, then dread, then outright fear. While that rhythm exists, dread is suffused throughout the entire movie. While there are scenes that are funny or act as catharsis, I realized each time that part of my laughter came out of just how tense I had been in the minutes leading up to it. What I loved here is that the tension (at least for me) was not as palpable as it is in some movies. I remember sitting in Annihilation during the bear scene, so in terror that I broke a nail gripping the seat. Or realizing halfway through Don’t Breathe* that my shoulders hurt from holding my whole body tight. No, Longlegs isn’t like that. This dread is much more insidious. Coming home from Longlegs reminded me of coming home from Hereditary: I thought I was fine, and then suddenly I felt kind of afraid to fall asleep, and every time I woke up, I was examining shadows.
In short, Longlegs corrodes into you over the space of an hour and 41 minutes. Like Silence of the Lambs, it feels utterly unique even while clearly paying homage to what came before it. I’ve made these comparisons to other films and plenty of better reviewers than me have, too, but in the end, Longlegs still stands apart as something I haven’t experienced at the movies in a long time. I’ve enjoyed Oz Perkins’ work before but felt that he never quite achieved greatness: this movie is his greatness.
The directing isn’t the only thing that stands out, though it does. Perkins sets a lonely, sparse tone and uses the best directorial tropes of the genre to brilliant effect. The set design adds to the mystery, with small clues or asides that the viewer wants to know more about. The script adds some purposely awkward dialogue that adds to one’s feeling of surrealism and discombobulation. But what really elevates Longlegs is the acting. Monroe agent Lee Harker, who could easily be a more awkward Clarice Starling clone, and adds depth. Lee reacts to most things with an eerie outward calm, but Monroe makes the terror behind her eyes clear. Underwood’s performance brings similar subtly, but going into details on that would bring me to spoiler territory. I was also extremely impressed by Alicia Witt and Carmel Amit. Kiernan Shipka’s performance is the best I’ve ever seen from her, and that is saying a lot as she has always been brilliant.
And of course there’s Nicolas Cage. In this movie he is the phrase “what the fuck?!” as a person, especially if you picture that being said with an extremely nervous laugh. Just as he has been in the last several years in performances in Pig, Mandy, or Color Out of Space, Cage holds absolutely nothing back here. Some reviews I’ve seen feel that this performance verges into silly, but I disagree. To me, the moments where I laughed uncomfortably in the face of his performance just increased my appreciation of what the movie was trying to do.
Another criticism I’ve seen comes from people who are dissatisfied by the “explanation”. Obviously, I won’t share anything about that in this review, though feel free to discuss it below and use spoiler tags if you do, please. All I’ll say is that I resent the increasing demand for horror movies to act as puzzle boxes with tightly planned explanations where everything fits into a slot in the end. Most of the greatest horror movies of all time left something to mystery, let some explanation be “I dunno, people are fucked up” or “ghost stuff”, or “death just be like that sometimes”. If you want everything to make sense in the end, this movie isn’t for you. But if you’re okay with leaving a movie going “what the fuck? Let’s do that again”, Longlegs is very, very much for you.