Movie Review : Longlegs (2024)

I love intelligent horror movies. By that, I mean films that aren't happy with hiding a supernatural monster in the shadows and cranking the volume every now and then to brutalize your nervous system. Films that feel wrong, corrupted somehow and who elicit an inexplicable sense of dread that cannot be immediately shaken off once it's over. You know which movies I'm talking about. Osgood Perkins' Longlegs is one of these intelligent movies. It's not the most terrifying, nor the worst thing you've ever seen.

But it's quite good? I have no idea why people are slamming this movie so hard because they were not scared into catatonia. It has become difficult for movies to be appreciated for what they are.

Longlegs tells the story of FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) who's haunted by the childhood memory of a winter encounter with a strange man in makeup (a god-tiered Nicolas Cage). She's investigating a string of family murders seemingly committed by the fathers always in the exact same circumstances. On each site is a cypher signed by a person calling herself Longlegs, leading the bureau to believe a serial killer is behind these murders, but there's no way to prove he was ever inside any of the houses.

Horror and the Limits of Reason

This is a more simple movie than it presents itself to be. In all honesty the story is a little silly, but the charm of Longlegs lies in how it's being told. It's a savant mix of psychological and supernatural horror that leans heavier on the former. Special Agent Lee Harker is investing a string of crimes with impossible logistics and possible ties to Satanism and, since it’s all happening in crummy, ugly 1990s, all she has to go on to form theories is her imagination and that alone can be the scariest fucking thing.

Harker takes her cues from very drab and very real evidence: puppets, steel orbs, cyphers, memories. That leads her to a conclusion where she suspects Satanic ritual murders and this is where Osgood Perkins' direction and editing kind of become the whole show. Longlegs is a story told in the way I love them to be told : intricate framing (often with hidden clues), larger shots that let your eye wander, incongruous cuts, heavy horror synth. I would watch just about anything were it were assembled exactly like that.

There's really nothing spectacular or even intelligible happening, but it somehow feels wrong and evil because you’re left at the end with a half-assembled puzzle and only a vague idea of what it might portray. So, I understand the criticism that Longlegs is all tone and no substance, but I kind of disagree? It's kind of the whole point of the movie to make you yearn for a resolution (or even just a narrative) that makes sense. It sems from a time-honored literary tradition called weird fiction.

Sometimes life it just shitty and it doesn't make sense.

Weird Fiction, Quiet Horror, Whatever. It Works

I'd claim Longlegs also qualifies as quiet horror, a subgenre of weird fiction focusing on tension, dread and disturbed emotional states, which Special Agent Lee Harker more than qualified for. It was popularized and kept alive in the twentieth century by authors like Shirley Jackson, Ramsay Campbell, Robert Aickman and Clark Ashton Smith. In a great number of these stories, everything is fine and the protagonist ends up creating a problem for himself by seeing one where there isn’t.

It's not exactly what happens here, but kind of? Horror emerges from Harker trying to make 2+2=4 and having it making 5 every time. There's no confrontation with evil to properly speak of. It has done its bidding and made life worse for everyone, especially for her. What Harker is investigating on has already happened a long time ago and there's very little she can do to stop it. There's certainly nothing she can do to keep herself safe from it. That's where the horror stems in Longlegs and I thought it worked.

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Is Longlegs the scariest thing I've ever watched? Not by a long shot. Was it a quirky and weird little movie that wiggled its way between my skin and my bones? Absolutely. I'd even claim it was nuanced and understated enough for me to watch it a second and maybe a third time. Osgood Perkins is a sharp storyteller. Maybe this wasn't the most engaging story, but he found a way to tell it in a powerful and energetic way. Longlegs isn’t style-over-substance, but it shrewdly maxed out what it could do with its screenplay.

7.6/10

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