The hype and promotion surrounding Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage‘s Longlegs was bigger and infinitely more satisfying than the movie itself. That’s what I kept thinking to myself as I finally sat down to watch this highly anticipated horror movie. Like people online, the teaser material for Longlegs drew me in. The teasers were unsettling, weird, and promised something bigger, scarier, and unlike anything we’ve seen before. But at the end of it, when the screen went black, I found myself underwhelmed by Longlegs.
A part of the underwhelmed factor of this movie was due to me having seen stories like this before. Walking into the movie I expected to experience something demented, the likes that I had never seen. But this movie ended up going in circles without giving me clear direction of who the big bad is before going for the obvious that the mother was involved. That left me feeling like Longlegs was incomplete and just pieced together from horror tropes before it. Longlegs became one of many instead of standing out. And it managed to do that while not telling a concise story and like I had to return to theaters for part 2. But there wasn’t a second part. This was it.
Now don’t get me wrong, the performances by Monroe and Cage were fantastic. I’m of the fact that Monroe deserves more critical acclaim for the transformative actress that she is. Even when she wasn’t talking, you could feel the tension running through her entire body and the fear, confusion, and unsettling panic that she felt. As for Cage, he completely disappeared into his character. I didn’t see the iconic actor. I saw a character. And this movie faltered by giving us a mystery that felt like he was at the heart of it, and then not giving us enough of him in the first place.
A lack of directionality is what really killed Longlegs. There was no need for the devil coming into homes through a doll. Or more accurately the ball inside of the doll’s head. Cage was right there. Longlegs was there. And it felt jarring to think that Longlegs was the big bad to only find out he was a pawn to something bigger and then never actually getting to find out what that bigger thing is. Even the mother felt like a letdown. There was no emotional hold on my heart that would make me think her sacrifice was worth it.
Longlegs needed to push more into the mythology of who Longlegs is, creating a platform for Cage to become one of the most iconic and scary bad guys in horror. Or they needed to lean into the devil of it all. Because those moments where the doll was covered by the veil and you saw eyes behind it, those were terrifying. It spoke of something darker. But Longlegs didn’t manage to click those pieces together and actually make me care that this darkness was destroying lives. It didn’t even take the time to put together the pieces to explain why I as a viewer should care about the story besides horror and great actors. Or even why the birthdays mattered.
So kudos for creativity when it came to the marketing campaign and the actors chosen in Longlegs. But it’s a grand shame that the team behind this movie didn’t create something that felt coherent enough to make a seasoned horror consumer like myself feel fear, pity, pain, or even twisted joy that people were being taken out. Besides the cinematography being distinctly off-putting and intriguing enough to get me to look those creatives up on IMBb, Longlegs made me feel nothing during the actual viewing of the movie.
Longlegs is now in theaters.
