{Movie Review} A World of Dark: Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs (2024)

“Our prayers don’t help us.”

When you’re me and you do what I do, you don’t get a lot of opportunities to see a movie without knowing at least a little something about what to expect. With Longlegs, I knew that it was directed by Oz Perkins, that it starred Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, and I had seen the very earliest, dialogue-free teaser trailer, which suggested a mix of true crime and occult vibes but told me nothing about the plot. I hadn’t even so much as read its one-sentence IMDb synopsis.

Nor is Longlegs the kind of movie where not going in blind is going to wreck it for you. While it saves several (mostly predictable) twists for its final act, it isn’t a film that relies on pulling the rug from beneath its audience. On the other hand, it was a fun experience to get to build the flick in my head as it went along, rather than already having preconceptions and reconfiguring them as the plot unspooled.

If you want to emulate that experience as much as possible, I’ll just say that Longlegs is a solid mix of police procedural and occult tropes, with more than a little red stuff and a few genuinely creepy moments. It has a knockout performance by genre stalwart Maika Monroe and perhaps a bit too much of Nicolas Cage being Nicolas Cage, but your mileage may vary, because most people seem to have more patience for Cage than I do.

It’s also already doing remarkably well for itself. The screening I saw was sold out, and I heard from another source that it was showing on something like nine screens at an AMC. That’s… unexpected, certainly, but great for original horror content, for Perkins, and for this flick.

Oz Perkins is a director whose work I have never loved, but who I’ve also never regretted watching. As I said to someone after the screening, each thing I watch by him makes me eager to see the next thing, because I feel like it will be better. For all its occasional shagginess, Longlegs is definitely his strongest and most assured to date, even while it’s also him returning to some of the same wells he first visited all the way back in Blackcoat’s Daughter, and sampling from them with greater confidence.

So, what is the movie actually about? That IMDb synopsis that I mentioned not having read says, “In pursuit of a serial killer, an FBI agent uncovers a series of occult clues that she must solve to end his terrifying killing spree.” That’s accurate enough, but it also elides much of the film’s actual running time. If anything, I wish that Longlegs had spent more time as a cold case procedural before amping up the weirdness, but as it is there’s perhaps a little too much crammed into its hour-and-forty-minutes.

Maika Monroe’s FBI agent is maybe a little bit psychic, which is how she gets assigned to the case despite being a rookie. It’s no big surprise when we learn that she has a personal connection to it that even she is unaware of, and the movie gradually loads us up on occult nonsense, creepy dolls, Satanic shenanigans, mind control, Faustian bargains, and so on. It’s the kind of cocktail that could easily have filled another hour, and it occasionally rubs awkwardly against the film’s intimate nature and miniscule cast of characters – each piece of the puzzle is a little bit inevitable, as there are only so many people involved, and each one has to drop into their appointed place.

Similarly, Cage’s heavily made up turn as the film’s namesake works except when it doesn’t. There are times when his performance is “nightmarishly gonzo,” to quote the Critics’ Consensus on Rotten Tomatoes, and other times when it just feels like Cage being Cage, distracting from the choking sense of enclosing panic that the picture is trying to portray.

It’s difficult to say whether it’s just my own predilections speaking (I love a good, creepy cold case movie about people sifting through paperwork and looking at old photographs) or an actual criticism of the film itself, but I wanted Longlegs to spend more time slowly teasing out the threads of the case, and less on its occult explanations. As it is, there’s a heavy dose of exposition in the film’s third act, which somehow manages to both over- and under-explain what all has been going on up ‘til then.

Ultimately, though, this seems like a rather harsh take on a movie that I feel far from harshly about. If I am rough on Longlegs here, it comes from a place of affectionate frustration, because it comes so close to being the movie that I still think Perkins has up his sleeve. He almost hit it out of the park here, and if this is as close as he ever gets, he’ll still have done better than a lot of directors ever manage.

As I said up above, Longlegs seems to be performing nicely for itself right out of the gate, and hopefully word of mouth will drive more people to the multiplexes in the coming weeks. Because whether it was quite what I wanted it to be or not, Longlegs is a strong, creepy, original horror movie with solid direction and a fantastic lead performance by Maika Monroe – and it’s nice to see one of those doing well.