“Longlegs” is a Terrifying Journey with a Tacky Execution

The new horror phenomenon is horrifying in concept but disappointing in presentation

For better or for worse, nothing about Longlegs feels human. At times this inhumanity translates into abject horror, at others it shrinks into hackneyed platitudes. Longlegs possesses an agonizing emptiness even as sheer terror is disrupted by tired genre mechanisms, but the resultant vacant feeling embellishes the suspense. 

The film’s gaps in originality are not its sole incongruity: director Osgood Perkins is quick to kill and reluctant to linger, creating an urgency that grows painful in the film’s sparse atmosphere. As the narrative clock ticks louder, the film’s static ambience turns to absolute horror. Longlegs excels in establishing a suffocating disquiet; while the horror is abstract and lingering, Perkins’ few jumpscares distort the threat rather than revealing it. The horror is hidden in plain sight because we can close our eyes and imagine we are escaping it.  

Longlegs’ diversions from its formulaic composition extend beyond form and function. While the plot is surprisingly standard — FBI agent Lee Harker and her partner race against the clock before Longlegs (Nicholas Cage), a serial killer who speaks in ciphers, strikes again — the film spends a substantial portion of its first acts resisting the typical motions of a routine narrative. Longlegs hovers in the space created by an ardent certainty that devolves into fear. Strong convictions sour and become paranoia, creating a vacuum in which morals and ethics have no hold; beliefs must be maintained by any means necessary. 

But while Longlegs departs from standard mechanisms, it fumbles and becomes tangled in its own relevance. The film ultimately rejects successful simplicity for cheapness, abandoning the foundations it had already laid in exchange for contrivances and impossibilities that cannot be staked to the ground. It begins to over-explain in search of a broader purpose, but the film is mired in an obsession with elevating itself yet unable to satisfy its own questions. What should have been left a mystery is needlessly described, and what ultimately remains unanswered is mundane; the audience is not motivated to probe for explanations. 

As the credits roll following the lackluster denouement, the film’s dependence on cliché comes into focus. Unsettling depictions of children’s imagery, androgyny with the intention to repulse the audience, and satanism as a catch-all for inexplicable depravity illuminate that fact that Longlegs hardly employs an original thought. None of the film’s suffocating emptiness sticks after the theater lights come up. A haunting image or two may return to you the next time you are sitting alone at night, but Longlegs is ultimately only terrifying in the abstract and mediocre in the actual. 

OVERALL SCORE: 6/10

Longlegs was released on July 12, 2024 and is currently showing in US theaters.