Longlegs

Sometimes style over substance isn’t enough to save a movie, especially with a script that can’t decide what it wants to be half the time.

Turning the clock back to the 1990s, Longlegs follows FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she tracks down an occultist serial killer who, for some odd reason, is never present when his alleged crimes take place. Needing to get to the bottom of how “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage) can not only brutally murder his victims but then get away with it with nary a shred of evidence to pin him to the scene, Lee soon realizes that there’s more to this case than what she’s led to believe, pulling her deeper into the depths of Longlegs’ years-long violence and insanity in ways she can’t easily escape or understand. Burdened by her overbearing and overly religious mother, Lee’s dive into the satanic and occult forces her to come to terms with her own past while trying to understand why a certain kind of doll has been in the possession of every one of the families who were murdered — a sole clue in a sea of dead ends and unexplainable events that Lee can’t afford to let continue.

First, let’s get out of the way what this film does right: it drips tone and mood and, on paper, should have been a surefire hit for horror fans and anyone who loves a good slow-burn serial killer flick. Presented with pitch-perfect cinematography that sells the inherently scary nature of Longlegs‘ story, the filmmaking in this one is quite good on a technical level, with everything from its opening 4:3 ratio to the scattering of truly disturbing scenes to its solid but subtle acting all being highlights in a movie that’s decidedly not full of them. Because once you get over how pretty everything looks and move past the wide-eyed insanity Nicolas Cage predictably and reliably brings to the table, Longlegs is a muddled mess that tries its hardest to cover up its middling quality with a forced sinister sheen that shouldn’t fool anyone.

Unsure of whether it wants to be a Seven/Zodiac knock-off or a low-key supernatural film, Longlegs cherry-picks the broadest of elements from all of its influences yet fails to bring them together in a coherent manner while simultaneously not doing enough to forge its own identity in a way that makes me care about what the filmmakers were trying to accomplish. Sure, the performances are solid, but after a genuinely chilling prologue got me giddy for what would come next, it didn’t take long for me to realize that Longlegs wasn’t going to be the movie I wanted it to be nor what it presented itself as, with my fleeting enjoyment of it directly linked to the stutter-stepping the script kept doing from a narrative and character perspective. Throw in a seemingly inconsequential subplot with Lee’s mother being a religious fanatic that then suddenly becomes the entire climax of the film, and I really wasn’t feeling the way almost anything turned out by the time the credits rolled, making me wonder what the point of it all was.

It’s not that Longlegs is a straight-out bad film, but it’s definitely a disappointing one that constantly makes promises the filmmakers can’t and simply don’t deliver on, resulting in a frustrating watch that would have benefitted greatly from a more focused narrative and slightly more attention paid to the Nicolas Cage factor of it all — the entire selling point of the film, or so I thought. And while his subtle presence helps in ways that only Nicolas Cage can, the fractured plot, unearned and uninspired third-act reveal, and overall “meh-ness” of it all does nothing to help matters, making me wish Longlegs would have just picked a lane and stayed in it.