Longlegs: A Spine-Chilling Journey
You’ve heard the hype; now for my two cents… Longlegs features one of Nicolas Cage’s most bizarre performances. If you know anything about Cage, you can imagine just how strange this movie must be. I'll begin by saying that I loved the direction of this movie. Longlegs has its own uniquely potent life force. It’s unsettling but also deeply interesting… until it’s not.
The film is broken into three chapters. I was enthralled by the first two, but I felt the third chapter did not meet the intense expectations set by the previous ones. Maika Monroe, who has been in several horror flicks since It Follows, is great here as usual. She plays an FBI agent hunting down a serial killer, and the movie definitely evokes Silence of the Lambs vibes several times. I was even reminded of Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia more than once. Longlegs excels as a mystery laced with uniquely subtle supernatural elements, which felt creative and fresh.
That potent atmosphere I mentioned makes you feel like you’re hurtling toward something cataclysmic, almost on the level of David Fincher’s Se7en. This is an exciting feeling, especially in a somewhat full movie theater. Longlegs did a great job of making me feel like anything could happen at any time. The first two acts are punctuated by Cage's intoxicatingly bizarre performance. However, after that, the movie began to lose me and continued to do so through the climax. I don’t have anything particularly negative to say about the ending, other than it felt fairly ordinary, as far as horror movies go, compared to the first three-quarters of the story.
Similar to the TV series LOST, the beginning and even the middle ask a lot of interesting questions that are unfortunately followed by less interesting answers. This was also the first horror movie I’ve seen in a semi-crowded theater in quite a while. Given the current direction of movie theaters, it could have been one of my last. If so, it’s a solid flick to go out on. In the end, I was only disappointed because of how exceptional most of the movie felt. I’m looking forward to seeing what first-time director Osgood Perkins comes up with next.
Longlegs is sure to produce boundless memes of Nicolas Cage once images and GIFs of his performance begin circulating online. So, if you want to be surprised by his appearance halfway through the film, go see it before it’s available to stream at home. The theaters are unusually full for this one right now.
