I’m not saying Longlegs is a bad movie. I’m just saying it’s not as good as everyone thinks it is.
Longlegs’ marketing team should win an award, because the marketing campaign for this movie was excellent. There was a lot of hype. It was my most anticipated movie of the summer - and yet I had reservations. The trailers showed no hint of a plot, only semi-disturbing imagery edited in a grating, strobe-like manner. Like, this movie should start with a disclaimer about strobe effects.
I’ve been on the hype train before and it rarely leads where it says it will.
Unfortunately, the trailers were indicative of what the movie would be. Dread-inducing style, hard cuts, but little in the way of substance.
In fact, the editing in this movie smacks of those scary TikTok channels that the algorithm feeds me late at night when I should be sleeping and not getting scared out of my mind, thankyouverymuch. You know the ones. Everything looks like a grainy, dark polaroid of an unknown location from the 90s. Someone wakes up in the middle of the night and sees a scary figure outside of their window.
Flash cut to the POV character’s face.
Flash to outside. Figure.
Flash to POV character.
Flash cut to outside. No figure.
Flash cut to POV character BUT THERE’S A SCARY FACE BEHIND THEM! AH!
Flash cut to black.
I’ve heard Osgood Perkins movies described as all style, no plot, and that’s an apt description. He directed I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House, the least substantive and most atmospheric horror movie to ever exist. Longlegs has miles more plot than Pretty Thing, but that's a low bar to jump.
I found the style of Longlegs annoyingly grating and honestly kind of a cheap trick because it makes the movie feel a lot scarier than it actually is. It’s not bad; per se. I believe it fulfilled Perkins’ vision. But without the flashy editing and bombastic musical cues, what are we left with?
We’re left with Nic Cage Nic-caging in a Jennifer Coolidge mask, but we’ll get to him soon enough.
Not much else. We’re left with a movie nowhere near as disturbing and grisly as Se7en that lacks the emotional intimacy of SIlence of the Lambs. These are the two movies Longlegs has been compared to most often, and Longlegs is nowhere near in the same league. This movie won’t be remembered more than five years from now.
***Warning: This is the point in the review where things get spoilery. Read at your own risk.***
I don’t want to make it sound like I hated everything about this movie. There are a few really good, subtle things. For example, Lee Harker’s monotonous personality. We’re left wondering throughout the movie why she’s so flat and disconnected, and this is juxtaposed with the fact that she says once that she wanted to be an actress when she was a little girl. And how? And then when we finally meet her mother, she seems to be dealing with mental illness. When we meet Longlegs’s one known survivor, played by Kiernan Shipka1, we’re struck by how similarly broken she is.
Ya’ll. All three of these women are like this because they are all still under Longlegs’ control. The metal balls in their dolls were still intact. Lee is so emotionless because she’s not all there.
Being under Longlegs’ control also helps explain how Lee “coincidentally” was assigned to the Longlegs’ case. She joins the FBI because Longlegs tells her to through mind control, and then Agent Carter picks her to work on the Longlegs case because at this point Ruby had already been given the doll and the entire family was already under his control.
Of course, we have to fill in some blanks to make this conclusion. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to draw those lines than to believe that Lee was assigned to this case purely by happenstance.
The subtlety and logic ends there, unfortunately. There are several elements in the movie that were obviously added for aesthetics and creep factor:
The symbols. Why do we even have these? He literally gives Harker the key to them immediately. It would have been so much more impactful if she’d solved it herself.
The daughters’ birthdays being on the 14th. Why? What symbolic importance does this serve? The whole inverted triangle thing is just a bunch of empty nonsense.
The dolls. Everyone keeps saying how realistic the dolls are, and how much they look like the girls they are supposed to represent. Ya’ll, they look NOTHING LIKE THEM. At all. And the dolls aren’t that creepy. They don’t even look the same, stylistically. One of them looks like a giant barbie doll!
Longlegs’ weird singing and screaming. What the heck?
That brings me to the Nicolas Cage of it all. Would this movie have been given the marketing push and otherwise received the hype it’s gotten without Nic Cage? I posit not.
I know I said I’d talk about Nic Cage earlier in this review, but now I’m struggling to come up with anything to say. He’s a talented actor, no doubt about it, and his performance is good2. It would be especially difficult to act while wearing that amount of prosthetics. The makeup is unsettling. There was only one shot where I even kind of recognized Nicolas Cage underneath it, and it was only in the eyes.
In the end, Longless just leaves a lot of questions. It’s okay for movies to not spell everything out, but I at least need a sense that the filmmakers know what’s going on. I don’t believe that for this movie. Here’s a selection of things the movie just ignores:
What is Longlegs’ deal? Why does he have the powers that he does? Why is he obsessed with girls who have birthdays on the 14th? What’s with the lyrics shown on screen at the beginning of the movie - how do they relate thematically to the plot? Why does Longlegs look like his body’s in the process of rejecting a face transplant? Why does he call himself Longlegs? If Longlegs’ deal is that he mind-controls fathers into killing their families, why did he target Lee’s family when there’s no father around? What was Longlegs’ method before his agreement with Lee’s mom? Why was he tying her up if he was capable of mind controlling her? What’s up with every single man in this movie except Blair Underwood being pointedly soft-spoken? What did Ruth mean when she said that she and Lee would burn in hell if Agent Carter didn’t kill his family?
In effect, what was the point? What is the movie trying to say? In a better movie, each of these seemingly disparate elements would have fallen in place at the end like pieces of a puzzle. Longlegs is like four different puzzles thrown together in one box.
There are a lot of movies that are less sensical and less good than Longlegs. I’m just saying this one isn’t as good as everyone says it was. Insert disclaimer about movie quality being objective, your mileage may vary, yada yada.
Weirdly still one of the better horror movies to release this year, which says more about this years’ offerings than it does about Longlegs.
-H. H. Duke
H. is For Horror is written by author H. H. Duke, who writes fantasy, horror, and more. She cohosts the Dukes of Horror Podcast with her brother. Most importantly, she loves horror!
Shipka appeared in one scene in this movie. I was surprised she took such a small role, but she knocked that monologue out of the park.
Maika Monroe is also great. Didn’t realize she was the same girl as the lead in It Follows until I went to go watch the movie. Everyone in this movie is great.