Longlegs - Movie Review

The Movie: Longlegs

The Director: Osgood Perkins

The Cast: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby

The Story: 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.

The Rating: 7 / 10

The Review:

I've seen so much advertising for this movie saying it's the scariest movie of the year and scariest movie of the decade. I'm here to tell you that Osgood Perkins' latest effort is neither of those things and it most likely was never intended to be but marketing people for movie studios need to lock in as much first weekend box office as they can so the hype is the hype whether there is any truth to it or not. Is the movie scary? Yes, but don't go in expecting a jump scare extraveganza or a bloody, gore filled festival of frights.

Longlegs is definitely more along the lines of Silence of the Lambs and I think anyone who has seen both will easily be able to point out a lot of similarities. For me, that was a good thing because, yes it's a great movie although I felt like it was very much lacking in originality. I mean, how many of these serial killer hunting movies have we seen over the years and how much more is there to bring to the table. I feel like the movie would have been better served if Osgood had gone farther into the more devilish aspects of the story rather than just touching on them here and there.

It's hard to expand on that without giving away spoilers so I'll just say that the story could have really gone down a wild path if the director wanted to go there, but I think he really wanted to keep the more psychological side intact and the eventual face off (yes, that's a Cage reference) between Monroe's protagonist and Cage's deranged killer. What we do get is a descent into tension and dread and that inescapable, eerie feeling that something is lurking in the shadows, outside a window, or behind some trees.

At the beginning of the movie, there was a group of young folks who had entered the theater and you know how there's always that one person, especially at horror movies, who wants to be loud and laugh at stuff that is kinda funny but not like that, well he was in this group. It was annoying at first as he overexaggerated his reactions and his friends were feeding off the energy but then, as the movie progressed, you could tell they were getting sucked into the darkness and eventually joined everyone else in the rabbit hole of unease that the movie was filling the theater with.

And that's how I knew this was going to be a really great movie going expreience and all the cast and crew needed to do was stick the landing and we may just have a new classic to watch over and over again. Again, it unfortunately didn't end up raising to those heights although I did completely enjoy the movie for what it was and Maika Monroe was a major part of that enjoyment. She absolutely nailed every moment of her performance and adds so much nuance and so many subtleties that it's easy to get drawn into her journey.

On the flip side of that, I felt that Cage's character was also nothing we haven't seen before and, for hardcore horror fans, is pretty tame compared to a lot of other iconic baddies out there. If the stuff I mentioned earlier had been explored further, I think Cage would have been able to do a lot more with the character than what we get. Overall, this movie was very well executed, it just wasn't quite the complete movie that it could have been. Either way, chalk this up as another genre win for Maika Monroe as she continues to be one of the most dependable horror stars of the last decade.