LONGLEGS (2023)

Longlegs had this bizarre and magical air about it when it was released. I hadn’t heard a word spoken about it and suddenly social media was a-buzz about it. Was it because Nicholas Cage had become such a meme that to see him actually perform in a film was a surprise to people who aren’t aware of any of his work before The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent?

Go and watch 8MM now!

I admit that I found that it was magical as well, as it took me 4 goes to stay awake through the whole thing. The spell of boredom it cast was such that it took me that many goes to sit through it.

Longlegs was written and directed by Osgood Perkins, not just the writer/ director of I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House but also something I didn’t know until writing this review, is the son of Psycho’s Tony Perkins and starred in Legally Blonde as David!!

Longlegs tells the tale of FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) who, after a disastrous door to door investigation that saw her partner shot, has an evaluation that discovers her to be a little bit psychic.

She is partnered with Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) and is put on the Longlegs case, which sees a group of families getting a visit from a person who calls themselves Longlegs (Nic Cage) and soon after the father cracks, kills the family and then himself… but why, and what does it have to do with the child of the family’s birthday? After being visited anonymously during the night with a key to the Zodiac Killer-styled notes being left, Harker seems to somehow be involved, or is she? And why are these bizarre dolls left behind at the victim’s houses?

This film ticked all the boxes for me: serial killer, police investigation, a little bit of cult craziness, some interesting choices of casting and cinematography and yet I found it a slog to get through. It felt like someone had discovered all my favourite foods and had decided that I’d like to eat them all together in a big silver bucket with a wafer-thin wafer for desert… but unlike my suggested Mr Cruseau, it did not split me open in a painful and difficult vomitous birth: it put me to sleep.

All through the film I felt there was an ingenuous homage/ parody of Silence of the Lambs, but instead of Jodie Foster’s uncomfortable take on being a woman in a ‘man’s’ environment, the main character of Harper is more like Ed Norton in Red Dragon: flat, emotionless, clinical… almost dispassionate in its performance. This made her unlikable and distracting and I even found her performance to just be an emulation of Holly Hunter in Copycat (remember that one?). The similarities to Silence of the Lambs even resonates down to the mildly effete sanitarium operator, helped to muddy its identity. They do address the aforementioned woman in a man’s world situation Harker is in, but it’s a ham-fisted take, and not at all subtle like Jonathon Demme’s film.

I found Cage’s performance to be quite interesting, but the awful make up kept distracting me . I think it would have been far more effective and less like a parody if he had been able to use his own, far more interesting face rather than this terrible prosthetics which even blocks his performance a little. Honestly, Alicia Witt as Harker’s mother’s physical transformation is far more surprising and interesting that Cage’s.

I have to say I get that cinema is about mood, but much like my beloved CSI and Criminal Minds TV series’s, I’m sure these crimes could be solved a lot faster if the investigators TURNED THE LIGHTS ON!!

Ahem, excuse me.

Here’s an interesting twist though: it all pays off in the third act. If you can make it through the first two acts, the pay off is pretty good… not excellent, and maybe not even worth the laborious first two acts, but it does come good. Even better, a rewatch reveals a lot of answers that out of context you flat out would never guess.

I have a constant craving for a horror film that is original and bucks the trend of the usual sort of mainstream crap that cinema goers, streamers, and physical media purchasers are subject to… this isn’t the solution, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Most really good horror movies can leave you with a sleepless night, but for me, Longlegs is a CURE for a sleepless night, that pulls itself up at the end… if you can stay awake to it. I hate to be the guy that tells you, like I was told about many TV shows, that by the sixth episode it gets good… I want to be hooked from the start, not by the time I’ve started to lose interest.

Extras: Only one extra, which is a commentary by Perkins, and it’s thorough and he clearly loves the process of filmmaking. Worth a listen.

Film: 4/10

Extras: 4/10

Rewatchability: 6/10

This film was reviewed with the Australian 4K release purchase from JB Hifi