A Beautiful, Frustrating Near-Miss from Oz Perkins, Longlegs (2024)
A Beautiful, Frustrating Near-Miss from Oz Perkins, Longlegs (2024)
"A visually hypnotic horror-thriller that doesn't quite deliver on its promise" — 3.5/5 Stars
Official trailer for Longlegs (2024) — Neon
Longlegs (2024) review: From the first frame, Oz Perkins’ horror-thriller lets you know you're in the hands of a visual stylist. He paints with shadows and light in a way that feels both meticulously crafted and dangerously unhinged. The aspect ratios shift like moods, the lighting schemes evoke everything from ’70s conspiracy thrillers to Scandinavian nightmares. There are moments of pure cinematic sorcery here—sequences so visually arresting they momentarily make you forget you're watching a movie and instead feel like you've stumbled into someone's fever dream.
But like the best fever dreams, Longlegs starts to fray at the edges when you try to make sense of it. The setup is classic procedural: Maika Monroe’s FBI agent Lee Harker, gifted with some undefined psychic intuition, gets assigned to a decades-old serial killer case that’s stumped the bureau. The killer, played by Nicolas Cage doing his best “nouveau shamanism” channeling, leaves cryptic notes signed “Longlegs.” It’s all wonderfully atmospheric—until the plot mechanics start showing.
Here’s where Perkins’ ambition outpaces his execution. The film asks us to believe that where countless seasoned agents failed, Harker’s vibe-based detective work cracks the case almost immediately. It’s a narrative shortcut that feels particularly glaring in a story that wants to be taken seriously as a psychological thriller. You can feel the script straining under the weight of its own mythology, introducing tantalizing threads only to drop them when they become inconvenient.
The Cage Factor
Then there’s Cage, doing whatever it is Cage does these days. His Longlegs is less a character than a collection of tics and whispers—sometimes terrifying, sometimes baffling, always compelling in that uniquely Cageian way. He’s the film’s wild card, and when he’s on screen, you can’t look away. Monroe provides the necessary anchor, her grounded performance creating a compelling contrast to Cage’s carnival barker menace.
The real disappointment comes in the final act. After building such an exquisite atmosphere of dread, Longlegs culminates in an exposition dump that tries to explain the unexplainable. What should feel like a revelation instead plays like a checklist of loose ends being hastily tied. The film’s ambiguous ending aims for haunting but lands on confusing—a cliffhanger that feels unearned because the central mystery has already been resolved.
"Perkins creates a world you want to get lost in, then forgets to give you a map to find your way out."
What’s frustrating is how close Longlegs comes to greatness. The pieces are all there: stunning cinematography, committed performances, a director with a distinct visual language. But the script needed another pass—or maybe a willingness to embrace the ambiguity it only flirts with. The film can’t decide if it wants to be a supernatural thriller or an arthouse horror, and in trying to be both, it never fully succeeds as either.
Still, there’s something to be said for a film that swings this big and creates images that will stick with you long after the plot holes fade from memory. And honestly? A big part of me wishes Cage had actually been some kind of head with spider-legs instead of whatever he ended up being.
Verdict: 3.5/5 — A beautifully flawed gem that's more interested in mood than coherence. Worth seeing for the atmosphere alone, but don't expect all the pieces to fit.
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