Longlegs
It's okay for a movie to be simply good, not great. This is one of those.
In the first film course I ever took, one of the first movies we watched for class was Jonathan Demme’s 1991 masterpiece, The Silence of the Lambs. Our instructor (shoutout Prof. Littman) asked us to watch the film in order to examine how genre functions within cinema, asking us if the movie was a horror film or a psychological thriller/drama. Of course, both answers are correct. So, as I am set to begin my graduate education in film studies this coming Fall, it is only fitting that a film discussed as “a modern Silence of the Lambs” (Flickering Myth) — if not perhaps a bit undeservingly — should appear at the very end of my undergraduate career.
Longlegs, written and directed by Actor-Director Osgood Perkins, was released on July 12, 2024. The film follows Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she hunts down the cryptic and elusive killer Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). As Harker falls deeper into the void of her pursuit, the true nature of her investigation begins to reveal increasingly more disturbing twists and turns. The film was preceded by a marketing campaign orchestrated by distributor NEON, which presented cryptic trailers, phone numbers, and billboards, as well as actual encoded messages using the satanic alphabet the titular serial killer Longlegs uses in the film. It would not be unreasonable to say that this movie attained a level of buzz akin to a Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity before its release, and was one of the most anticipated films of the summer, horror or otherwise.
Let me start this by stating very surely that this is a good movie (not the most thrilling review, I know). It's eeriness is permeable, creating a film that certainly develops a sense of dread over the course of its hour and forty minute runtime. Cinematographer Andres Arochi does an excellent job in creating bleak and hopeless spaces for our characters to orbit each other within. Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage turn in two fantastic performances as Agent Lee Harker and the titular killer Longlegs, respectively. It also has a positively terrifying opening scene, which sets the tone early for the unsettling buildup of tension that makes up the film's hour and forty minute runtime.
Cage brings a special kind of sickening sensation to the screen, largely due to the incredible cosmetic work done by the film's makeup team of Kristin Chaar, Jordan Crawford, Felix Fox, Keith Lau, and Harlow MacFarlane. Longlegs’ pale, sickly appearance — which was inspired by botched plastic surgeries — lends itself to his character’s depraved disposition as someone obsessed with crafting a cleaner world, and compliments Cage’s typically over the top performance quite nicely. Cage’s larger than life performances can sometimes feel even too big for the movies, but his freak flag flies higher than ever in this one, and it totally works to the point that my only qualm is that he wasn't in the film more.
I wanted to state all of this as plainly as possible so that it's not lost that I enjoyed this movie, and I would happily recommend it to anyone who will listen. That being said, it doesn’t quite hit the mark of a truly great horror masterpiece, despite what its marketing may suggest. I would be lying if I told you it was anything other than a functional horror thriller that is not short of scares, but lacks something to make it truly special.
(Spoilers ahead)
Don’t get me wrong, the movie is quite scary, but I found it to be a bit too reliant on prototypical jump scares to really maximize on its unsettling core themes of religious extremism and coming face to face with true evil. The film really lost me when it decided that the Satanic entity the characters performed their killings for was actually real. The movie had me locked into a gritty, “stare-into-the-void-of-humanity-and-see-what-looks-back-at-you,” grounded story and then completely blew it when the ultimate antagonist was suggested to be actually, for real, seriously; the devil. Suggesting that the evil of Longlegs as a character comes from supernatural demonic forces as opposed to a uniquely evil person lets a little bit of air out of the scare factor for me.
It is feasible to interpret the demonic smoke leaving Lee and her doll counterpart as a specific authorial decision by Osgood, where Lee is actually just fainting due to the trauma of the horrors she's been subjected to and the smoke is a hallucination or other fantasy, but even then, to imply so heavily that actual supernatural forces were at work dismisses any nuance the story had in its representation of how people on Earth can do evil akin to the devil without his assistance. All of this being said, I do think the film's fascination with religion is quite interesting, as there is some very clever subtext regarding salvation and how far we are willing to go to reach it, even if it is not as impactful as it could be.
(No more spoilers)
It is a bit harsh of me to hold the film itself responsible for the claims made by its distributor’s marketing department, but when we are talking about “the scariest film of the decade” and a “masterpiece,” a certain expectation is rightfully anticipated by audiences. Again, this is a good movie, I absolutely do not want that to be lost in this review, but I feel the hype surrounding it may have surpassed the film’s true quality as a basically fine horror movie. Ultimately, NEON’s over achievement in it's marketing (further cementing that it's the best indie film distribution company in the business right now) is only so much of a detriment, as with all of it stripped away the movie is still a tense, startling horror thriller that serves as a fine piece of horror filmmaking.
Finally, I will say that this movie is certainly not a modern Silence of the Lambs. Outside of the simple plot similarity that both films revolve around a female FBI agent hunting a serial killer, the two films could not be more different in their message or presentation. Although Longlegs obviously includes Silence of the Lambs among its inspirations (Fincher’s Se7en also comes to mind), it does little to rise above those inspirations to craft anything truly singular or great. I think it's okay to encourage enjoying new films while recognizing they are simple pastiches of other, better films, although it is a bit discouraging that two of the more anticipated films of the year, The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols), and Longlegs both find themselves in that category.
Overall Grade:
