'Longlegs' movie review: Creepy but ultimately harmless

A young FBI agent tasked with tracking down a mysterious serial killer called Longlegs is taken down a dark hole that she might not be able to crawl out of.

Something feels off in Longlegs. Like if someone shifted all the furniture in your house over one inch without you knowing. It's barely noticeable, but it makes you uncomfortable because you don't understand what it is. That's exactly how director Oz Perkins gets under your skin. Every shot leaves too much empty space around the characters—an open doorway or long empty hallway—like there's something lurking. Watching. The camera moves a bit too steady with a bit too wide of a frame giving off the sensation of vertigo. Then there's the sound. Sometimes it'll be a nearly inaudible drone, but just enough to make your hair stand on end, and other times a discordant throng that sends shivers down your spine.

Longlegs has an unrelenting creeping dread that will keep you glued to your seat but aching to turn away. It harkens back to a time when the anticipation of the scare was worse than what actually came. Easy comparisons can be made to the disturbing imagery of The Silence of the Lambs or casual cruelty of Seven because of the detective story at the center, but Longlegs finds a way to set itself apart. Unfortunately it's in those moments that you realize there was nothing to be afraid of all along.

Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), an FBI agent name if I've ever heard one, is relatively green but as she canvases house to house in an idyllic suburban neighborhood with her partner something tells her that the criminal they're looking for is in a very specific house. Perkins captures her partners walk to the house with a wide-angle lens that just barely makes the edges of the frame appear distorted. Her partner, wary of her “instinct,” knocks on the door. BANG. As she breathlessly chases the shooter through the house we're filled with anxiety. Nearly as much as Harper as she's surprised by her own accuracy.

It's that ability that leads her chief Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) to assign her to a case about a string of seemingly random murder-suicides. All the victims were families with a kid. All were perpetrated by the father. All without sign of forced entry other than a letter signed “Longlegs” somewhere in the house. The case disturbs Harker, not just because of the grisly details, but because it seems like it is coming to life all around her. In one of the best sequences, a loud knock disturbs her research into the case in her isolated cabin home. When a mysterious figure draws her outside, behind her in her house we see the same figure lurking. It's these masterful moments of suspense, using every tactic in the book that has given Longlegs its reputation as a terrifying piece of cinema.

We get glimpses of the eponymous Longlegs, played by a nearly unrecognizable Nicolas Cage whose vocal performance sounds like a cross between Peewee Herman and the Gingerbread Man from Shrek (“not the gumdrop buttons!!”). Perkins takes care to frame him just far enough away from the camera or just slightly out of frame to allow our imaginations to run wild and let our own nightmares fill in the rest. Unfortunately, that just means that the reveal is nothing short of disappointing.

It is the same reason that the way the plot unfolds leaves us wanting for more. Perkins ratchets up the tension to such an unbearable level that when he finally lets the spool unravel you expect chaos. Instead, the movie goes out with a whimper. Like a balloon slowly leaking air and all the fear is hot air. As the case hits very close to home, Harker has to deal with her and her mother's (Alicia Witt) religious trauma in a thematic throughline that never quite comes together in service of a horrifying atmosphere that while entertaining for a time add up to an empty web.

Earlier in the year The First Omen stunned with its own dread-filled brand of satanic panic and Late Night with the Devil conjured its own innovative take. And while those movies felt like singular entries pushing the genre in new directions, Longlegs is an amalgamation of better told stories that came before it. Perkins has a mastery for horror and suspense that is worth of his namesake—his father Anthony Perkins played Norman Bates in Psycho—but his stories lack the same gravity to live up to the classics he evokes. Just cue up The Silence of the Lambs.

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Hey! I'm Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I'm also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.