I am not a horror film aficionado by any stretch. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy a good scare, but I’ve found most of the films in the genre that get the accolades recently to be big on atmosphere and deficient in a good storyline. I was looking forward to seeing Longlegs mostly because of Nicolas Cage, who has made a fabulous comeback the past several years in roles that stretch and surprise, like Dream Scenario and Pig. And he doesn’t disappoint. The film, however, does not really hold together.
Written and directed by Oz Perkins, son of the classic horror Psycho‘s Anthony, it stars Maika Monroe as FBI Agent Lee Harker. She a serious young woman with an uncanny sense of intuition brought in on a serial killer case that has gone on for years and baffled the Agency from the beginning. Harker has some memories from childhood about a creepy guy at her house. He is the titular Longlegs, a nearly unrecognizable Nicolas Cage, obviously our serial killer, there to wish her a happy birthday in a very ghoulish sing-song. But she doesn’t remember or connect that until later.
The film has all the usual horror tropes: our hero hears someone in the house and goes into the darken rooms alone to check it out, runs out into the darkness after the intruder rather than locking the doors, doesn’t see what is happening right in front of her face. For the most part, the film relies heavily on creating a disturbing atmosphere through music and dark and sometimes inventive cinematography. And the story starts off with some creative choices, but it ends up with too many loose strings and unexplained plot points.
If you are a horror film fan, you may be entertained, but it isn’t a jump out of your seat kind of flick. More a just buy the Satanic possession storylines and don’t ask any questions film.