It’s been impossible to escape the hype around writer and director Osgood Perkins’ film Longlegs (2024). The film has been heralded as the new Silence Of The Lambs (1991) or this summer’s Zodiac (2007). But it’s virtually impossible for a film to live up to such comparisons with bonafide classics. Longlegs, because of its hype, will inevitably disappoint.
Perhaps a better comparison is to compare Longlegs to the first season of True Detective (2014). Both ventures combine the crime procedural with elements of supernatural horror while remaining focused on the personal deterioration of the detectives working the case. Both works also run into some of the same problems by reducing their characters to types that lack solid dimension despite the amount of screen time is relegated to them studying case files and leafing through crime scene photos.
Longlegs really takes its time building its narrative as Perkins focuses on sustaining the creepy atmosphere of dread. Nicolas Cage’s serial killer (a riff on Tiny Tim in Blood Harvest) is designed to provide a catharsis to this sustained creepiness. Cage delivers off-the-wall insanity as only he can. Yet the cumulative effects are less than brilliant. The atmosphere is sustained but investment in the investigation is not which renders the appearance of Cage as a jarring wake up call.
The scenes with Cage are the best in the entire film. And of these scenes nothing is more effective than that opening scene that’s meant to look like a Super-8 home video. It’s here that the horror has its urgency. As soon as Cage shares the screen with Maika Monroe the illusion is shattered and all of the suspense goes out the window because it is painfully apparent that Longlegs is just a movie.
This diffusion of Longlegs‘ slow building tension renders the last minute plot twist as a toothless jape. It feels so premeditated and well-worn that it loses its punch. A twist that should subvert expectations merely reaffirms them. This left me wondering what it was all for anyway?
Perhaps these shortcomings wouldn’t feel so awful if Longlegs weren’t heralded as one of the year’s best movies. As it is Longlegs is just another in a long line of David Fincher imitations. I wish the film had been more stylishly audacious. I wish it had been shot on 8mm and I wish all the soundtrack cues mined T-Rex’s discography. I wish Longlegs were memorable.
