The Reel Review
The tables are turned when a rookie FBI agent in early 1990s Oregon searching for a mysterious figure at the center of a decades-long series of gruesome family murder/suicides finds herself being hunted. Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt star in this horror/thriller.
Longlegs is heavy on style but light on substance – a super weird and creepy mashup of other, better horror films like Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, and Zodiac. Modern day horror queen Maika Monroe (It Follows, Watcher) is convincing as the exceptionally socially awkward agent with psychic powers, as is Witt as her strange, hyper-religious mother with hoarding issues. But Cage, sporting prosthetics and a bad wig as the titular Satan-worshipping Longlegs, is so over the top with his wacky serial killer schtick that it is more of a comic distraction than it is scary. Kiernan Shipka (Totally Killer, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) has a chilling scene as the killer’s lone survivor.
Using a dreary color palette and a creepy score, writer/director Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter) does an excellent job capturing the bleak mood along with some extremely gruesome kills to satisfy gore aficionados, but his predictable finale and kitchen sink of dangling subplots (her psychic powers, family trauma) ends up making Longlegs a confusing fever dream of a horror film that itself lacks legs.
REEL FACTS
• Longlegs writer/director Oz Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins (Psycho), who died in 1992 from AIDS-related causes and actress/model Berry Berenson, who was on one of the jets that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11.
• Maika Monroe was kept in the dark about Nicolas Cage’s physical transformation until her big scene with him, with microphones on her chest capturing her racing heartbeat, which is featured in the film.
• To promote the film, Neon created a phone number 1-458-666-4355, which plays a prerecorded, disturbing message from Nicolas Cage as Longlegs.
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