It’s Nick Cage time! Nick has been killing it on the indie and B-Movie scene for the last few years making a mixture of art, comedy and horror (Often at once) and clearly having fun with it. He’s been prolific too, you can pretty much count on 2-3 new Nick Cage films every year and they’ll all have something positive about them. Part of this has been a run of good horror movies. Everything from the crazy “Mandy” (2018), the solid Lovecraft piece “The Color Out Of Space” (2019), fun movies like “Willy’s Wonderland” (2021) and “Renfield” (2023) and recently the dark and underrated “Arcadian” (2024). But “Longlegs” is a movie that had hype long before anyone realized Cage would be in a central role. A number of cryptic trailers certainly helped put the movie on a lot of peoples radar, including myself.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Longlegs is written and directed by Osgood Perkins. The directors previous feature movie “Gretel and Hansel” was praised for the cinematography and criticised the script. However, since neither the writers nor cinematographer from that movie are involved here that leaves Perkins somewhat of a wild card. The movie stars Maika Monroe as “Agent Lee Harker” a young FBI agent with a somewhat psychic talent and a mysterious dark past which she can’t quite remember. Nicholas Cage plays creepy occultist villain “Longlegs”. Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt and Michelle Choi-Lee fill out the rest of the key cast.
Agent Harker is recruited to a special task force trying to solve the “Longlegs” murders. The murders are unique in that the families all seem to have been murder/suicide situations, but are tied together by cryptic notes left at each scene in the same handwriting and the date of birth of each of the families daughter. Harker immediately is able to make progress on the case but as she does she begins to realize things are a lot more personal to her and her mother than she could ever have guessed.
Atmosphere
The film has a good atmosphere. That is the big selling point. The story breaks down a little bit at the ending, and has some issues throughout but is serviceable. Nick Cage finds another character that allows him to make the most of his skills at playing the unhinged. This time though he pushes for more unsettling than comedic and mostly achieve that. Perkins does a good job of showing only as much of Cage as needed. This keeps the mystery and makes sure that the performance from cage doesn’t cross into “Not the bees!” territory. Maika Monroe’s character on the other hand drifts through the entire film like it’s a fever dream. This is entirely intentional and while it doesn’t ask a lot of the actress she pulls it off well. Alicia Witt is a pleasant surprise here too and as Agent Harkers mother Ruth.
The plot certainly has a lot of interesting elements but it ends up somewhat cluttered. . Because of the dream like state that Agent Harker is in throughout the movie it’s hard to get any kind of emotional attachment to the character. She never actually does any detective work. Instead, all the solutions just magically come to her. It’s fairly clear early on (Perhaps from the start), what the Gotcha will be. When it happens, Harker’s reaction to it remains muted due to her continuing dream like state. It’s not quite the emotional pay off it should be. Her mother has an important roll, but we have no reason to care about her. This is largely because she isn’t introduced properly until half way through the movie.
Final Fate
The movie does spend some time humanizing Agent Carter, though Blair Underwood seems to be mostly phoning it in. It’s also done for somewhat obvious reasons, yet isn’t really effective. When these events pay off I was spending most of my time shouting at the screen for Agent Harker to do the obvious thing and stop standing around drooling instead of caring about what was happening. The ending left me somewhat unsatisfied, where as it should have left me feeling unsettled. I think part of this are that too many elements are introduced to this puzzle late on. The movie should have pushed a feeling of inevitable doom hard from the start.
The ingredients are here for a great movie, but the end result doesn’t quite live up to its potential. It is however a good step forward for Perkins as a director and I hope he builds on this in the future. Overall, while not entirely working the movie scores points for atmosphere and for Nick Cage’s performance. This is a 6/10. If you like atmospheric horror or Nicholas Cage being goofy, it is a recommendation. On the other hand, if you like deals with the devil and big gotcha moments in an atmospheric horror check out the vastly superior Angel Heart instead.
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