- Director: Osgood Perkins
- Screenplay: Osgood Perkins
- Cast: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Kiernan Shipka
- Cinematographer: Andres Arochi
- Editing: Greg Ng, Graham Fortin
- Score: Zilgi
- Genre: Horror thriller
- Runtime: 101 minutes
Much like 90s classic ‘The Silence of the Lambs‘ has a young, female FBI agent face to face against a notorious serial killer, ‘Longlegs‘ has Lee Harker (Monroe) hunting Longlegs, a deranged Satanist bogeyman (Cage). But instead of skin suits and fava beans, we’ve got creepy dolls and sinister religious elements as the components.
Lee Harker has a ‘gift’ – she’s supposedly ‘half psychic’ but this is only mentioned in the opening 15 minutes and promptly forgotten about for the rest of the movie. And, similar to all characters who are in any way ‘different’, she’s largely devoid of emotion (and personality) with Harker turning her head mechanically as if she’s an empty-headed automaton.
Nicolas Cage is prosthetic-ed up to the nines (straggly grey hair, bulbous nose, rubbery chin) – if it wasn’t for his voice I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was him. Pity the efforts of the makeup department are wasted as he gives his usual over-the-top performance. Usually a bit of craziness works well when playing a psychotic character but Cage is way too hammy to take seriously.
‘Longlegs‘ has a kind of experiment feel to it, with lingering visuals of bubbling liquids and snakes randomly thrown in, probably to give it a unique or unsettling quality – perhaps because the director knows the film is hardly original and has little bite to it. You’ve got to question why it was made – maybe Nicolas Cage (listed as a producer) wanted to play some sort of psycho for the fun of it.
I appreciate the ’90s-core’ feeling; grainy camera lenses, wintry woodlands and log cabins but it just comes off as an ‘X-Files‘ episode minus the aliens or again, ‘The Silence of the Lambs‘.
That said, I think it’s the first movie I’ve seen in which the end credits scroll up rather than down but it’s too late for that gimmick to save the film.
My rating: 4 / 10
SilverScreen 