Longlegs is one of the more interesting and daring horror movies of recent times, though sadly this doesn’t quite save the film from being something of a case of style over substance.
It’s worth a watch for a few different reasons, even though it is ultimately a flawed misfire. Primarily, the aforementioned style. The visuals of this film are stunning, the cinematography as a whole is superb: jump cuts, lingering cameras, perfectly framed transitions. All this gives it the feel of more of a Giallo film than a gritty Western one, and it certainly takes some influence from the highly stylised Suspiria and other classic Italian horror.
The music is also perfectly on point for the veiled supernatural elements of the film, mostly a creeping string affair with occasional brilliant minimal uses of synths, as are the mixed-media elements such as the almost subliminal shots of bunched coiled snakes, bodies, shadowy Satanic figures. There’s a lot to love here for horror fans in terms of visuals and vibes.
However, a lot of this style does little to distract from the more clumsy elements of the film. The lead protagonist is one of the biggest sticking points. I am assuming the character is supposed to have some sort of autism, but the actress’s wooden mannerisms almost come across as a form of overacting, and it doesn’t quite work. The iconography the film is steeped in is also somewhat poorly handled, and we’re just left to believe that our gifted autistic FBI agent can work out the messages, and no one else can. I understand the idea that it isn’t worth elaborating on and would potentially drag out a relatively slow film even more than it already is, but we’re not introduced to these characters well enough before we’re expected to care about them. We’re given no deeper pathos or desires for these people; they are just immediately tangled in the killer’s designs with very little fanfare.
The protagonist’s superior is also a hard pill to swallow. His bolshy mannerisms feel like they are from a completely different movie. The slow, suspenseful atmosphere created by everything else is entirely decimated every time he is on screen giving his ‘hard-boiled’ cop routine. It doesn’t work in the slightest, and only further makes the main protagonist herself less believable and sympathetic. They occupy differing and mismatched worlds.
One thing that makes this film worth watching is Nicolas Cage. The king of unhinged Hollywood, he’s the heart of the film here. Without him the film would disintegrate into nothing. That isn’t to say his performance is perfect—not that he ever is—but it is truly a sight to behold. His character is nothing short of absurd, if a little on the nose: a Satanic, hard-rock-loving dollmaker who looks like a mix of Beetlejuice and Mickey Rourke post–cosmetic surgery. His epithets, which morph into hard rock shrills and screams, are nothing short of stultifying, and every second he is on screen arrests your attention.
Again, he’s not elaborated upon in any meaningful way, and his backstory is glossed over in favour of short, sharp bursts of his mania. He is, however, a tremendous and daring character, and displays a type of absurd insanity that is very hard to pull off in a non-cheesy way. This puts him in league with someone like Art the Clown from Terrifier in terms of modern horror villains—no bad place to be.
The crescendo of the film loses its way a tiny bit. As its fairly surface-level plot attempts to wrap itself up with the usual twists and turns, it lost me a bit, between an overreliance on the previously mentioned police superior character as well as the focus on the dolls. I realise dolls are creepy and scary, but for a film that dares to do so much different, it felt a shame that this extraordinarily overused horror movie trope was so essential to the story at large, even if it is a semi-good use of them. It still felt like something I’d seen so many times before, whereas the villain himself was so absolutely unique.
Far from a bad horror, but ever so slightly underneath a great one. Worth a watch, but other than Cage’s performance, it will probably fade into the annals of horror history.