Longlegs Review: Maika Monroe’s Thriller Film Leaves a Lot to be Desired

For those of us in the audience who are obsessed with horror movies, Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs was a difficult film to ignore a few months ago due to its atmospheric and rather fear-inducing marketing tactics. And given the director’s previous works, it was a no-brainer to watch the Nicholas Cage and Maika Monroe release.

Following an FBI agent with a dark past, the film showcases authorities’ desperation to catch a mysterious criminal with seemingly otherworldly powers who has been pushing entire families to end their lives. However, Lee Harker’s desire to catch the criminal brings up some shady things from the past.

The best thing about watching an atmospheric horror movie is how breathless you feel throughout the runtime. It’s one of the biggest achievements that I feel a horror movie can present its audience – to watch a movie that leaves you so panicked that you forget to breathe. Longlegs‘s excellent cinematography makes you feel breathless, especially in the first half when it’s just a police procedural and crime thriller film that, firstly, makes us question who Longlegs is. The way the aspect ratio changes from one scene to another makes you invested in the story unfolding and you sit up in your seat just a little bit more because it’s so electrifyingly intense.

I cannot say enough good things about the direction and cinematography of Longlegs. It’s claustrophobia-inducing and makes you constantly look over people’s shoulders, half expecting Satan to walk in and another half expecting a deranged killer with a machete. However, the film is much more than all of that – its discussions surrounding childhood trauma and how that can take over a person’s life years later are fantastic and make you root for Harker’s misery and desperation. Maika Monroe, who entranced us in It Follows (one of my favourites), continues to be a force to reckon with in this one as she brings forth the fear and confusion of the situation that she finds herself in and, at times, you can see her being transported back to when she was a child.

However, Longlegs, in spite of creating a mystifying aura that does nothing but induce panic in the audience, is thoroughly disappointing. Although the film holds on to its intensity and fear, the explanations that the movie ends up giving are lacking at best. First and foremost, I feel like the movie could’ve just been an intense fever dream with little explanation because life sometimes can be like that. However, it overexplains and overanalyses and ends up a bit lost in the sauce after a while. Thus, when the movie ends, you scratch your head in frustration.

The problem here is there are too many sub-genres getting juggled with, so much so that the film isn’t able to handle any of them. I didn’t understand why Longlegs couldn’t be working under the instructions of Satan in his head, but he turning out to be just an evil man doing evil things. The fact that Satan is actually a thing here and the explanations that are given to justify some of Longlegs’s actions are nothing short of embarrassingly convenient. The sheer number of discrepancies is what leaves you annoyed and although, yes, you can just brush it away by suspending your disbelief, it doesn’t help that you are left to wonder about the possibilities here that the film thoroughly squanders away. At some point, I wondered whether a Longlegs end credit scene would have been a good choice to address some of these issues.

Honestly, Longlegs is also extremely predictable. While it takes time to give us the twists and turns, the little nuggets of information that it drops in order to make us curious reveal too much of what’s about to happen. Thus, you are able to predict what is about to happen long before it has happened, leaving you to find this movie sluggish as well. Like, for example, I fail to understand the point of the letters because, other than looking creepy, it doesn’t give any insight into anything which is also probably why we give up on it before the halfway mark. It’s an unnecessary addition, just like a few other things in the movie, that are there just for the shock factor and overstay their welcome.

I think Cage is usually a fun addition to any movie but for this one, I found his character to be a bit too goofy to be taken seriously. I wasn’t afraid of Longlegs, which is such a shame, because he seems to be a 70-year-old man and that is not very scary. Plus his mannerisms, although creepy, are a bit overdone for it to leave an impression on you. Monroe’s Lee Harker is interesting though and the character progression, and the last scene, leaves you feeling many different things for her.

Longlegs Review: Final Thoughts

Longlegs, in spite of its thrilling and heavy atmospheric tension that leaves you breathless, is a disappointing entry storywise. Some of the story doesn’t make sense while the others just reveal too much too early. Cage’s titular villain feels a bit too goofy and over-the-top and while I like that in some movies, it feels a bit out of place in this one. A thrilling crime procedural without the unnecessary and thoroughly convenient supernatural mumbo-jumbo would’ve made this a whole lot more terrifying than it already is, but that’s not what we got, did we?

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