Longlegs Stars Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage and is Directed by Oz Perkins

Review: Longlegs is technically brilliant, combining cinematography with a singular style and sound design that’ll keep you up at night. But the story never amounts to much more than a moody serial killer piece. Thankfully, Maika Monroe and Blair Underwood offer enough to have you engaged, and Oz Perkins is talented enough behind the camera to keep things rolling.

Longlegs Movie Review

Longlegs makes good on the promise of being a freaky horror tale that injects dread in every frame and through every nook and cranny possible. Director Oz Perkins, if for nothing else, continues to prove himself as a singular horror director, with a style that no soul could replicate and a thirst for the absurd, demented, and disturbed.

Which is all I can ask for considering the equally demented The Blackcoat’s Daughter that came out back in 2015 and felt nothing like its contemporaries – dry and moody dread with the increasing sense that the walls were closing in. Perkins’ work makes you wait as it lingers and lingers and lingers. The stories don’t reveal themselves to you entirely, making you work for the details until the final conclusion reveals all.

And that’s largely the case for Oz Perkins’ 2024 hit Longlegs, anchored by calculated, cold (and good!) performances from Maika Monroe as FBI Special Agent Lee Harker and Blair Underwood as Agent Carter. They fill runtime with the usual investigative motifs – uncovering clues, deciphering cryptic messages, interrogating witnesses or suspects. It’s relatively conventional but given the style and morbid nature of the whole experience, you know something disturbing is right around the corner.

In the case of Longlegs, those disturbing moments come at the hands of Nicolas Cage as the titular serial killer. Cage is going for it in a way you’d expect from the actor known for occasionally taking massive swings with his characterization and approach. And in Longlegs, there sure are a lot of choices. They don’t all work, feeling as though you can see right through the Longlegs character as a vehicle to let Cage get weird.

But it’s still an admirable effort, with Longlegs rising to the top of the most distinct horror movies in 2024. It’s an experience to see in movie theaters because you need to lock into the mood. At home, I’d imagine it’ll play much differently because it plays to a much slower pace than your typical horror movie.

And in that sense, it pairs well with The Blackcoat’s Daughter more than any of the other Oz Perkins films. Both movies are specifically demented and straightforward and feature a sort of nihilism that studio blockbusters rarely have the appetite for.

Which is why I still appreciate the work everyone is putting in here, even if the final product doesn’t deliver quite the gore and viciousness that the marketing campaign suggested, and the third act muddying up the story and feeling overwrought.

Ideally, I’d like to return to Longlegs again at some point this year knowing how the film ends and trying to see how all the pieces fit together on rewatch because they don’t tie together all too well initially. The individual scenes don’t provide context for what comes before or after, as if there’s no rhythm to the telling of the story.

So I’m lukewarm on it. Longlegs is technically brilliant, combining cinematography with a singular style and sound design that’ll keep you up at night. But the story never amounts to much more than a moody serial killer piece. Thankfully, Maika Monroe and Blair Underwood offer enough to have you engaged, and Oz Perkins is talented enough behind the camera to keep things rolling.

Score: 3 / 5

Genre: Crime, Horror, Thriller