"Longlegs"

  ☆½ 

After years and years of slasher films, moviemakers got the idea way back in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project that less on screen is more, and while it wasn't the wrong idea to get, a quarter century of "restrained" horror films demonstrates that far too often less is actually less.

Horror movies have become a kind of Rorschach test for a certain kind of moviegoer. If you don't get subtle meanings and cinematic references of "elevated" horror movies, you're somehow inferior. That's my biggest takeaway from Longlegs, which has received rapturous critical acclaim but is one of the dullest, least interesting movies—horror or any other kind—I've seen in a long time.

In Longlegs, tedium largely substitutes for tension, though there is a fair amount of the latter in the claustrophobic first few minutes, in which a young girl leaves the confines of her snowy white house to investigate the arrival of a very weird and disturbing stranger. This is the "Longlegs" of the film's title, an uncomfortably androgynous character. The movie is careful to describe him as a man, lest we get the wrong idea and think that Longlegs might be venturing into some dicey transphobic territory.

The gender of "Longlegs" turns out not to matter, just like the weird motives of the character really don't matter. Nor does the increasingly bizarre connection that this grotesque and outrageous character (played by Nicolas Cage, in no-holds-barred Nicolas Cage style) has with the FBI agent investigating him.  Very little turns out to matter in this slog of a film.

Longlegs may or may not be responsible for killing multiple families, who die in what appear to be murder-suicides. But there's reason to believe someone is behind the deaths, so the FBI brings in a "half-psychic" agent named Lee Harker (horror fans may try to make something of that last name). She's played by Maika Monroe as a permanently anxious yet stone-faced cipher whose childhood is the one depicted in the first few minutes of the movie.

There are more and more connections between Harker and Longlegs, so many that it seems impossible, after a time, to imagine that nobody put two and two together before this. The coincidences and intersections pile up in the increasingly stupid script by director Osgood Perkins. Trying desperately to be a "slow burn," Longlegs moves at such a glacial pace it sometimes seems to stop altogether. Though it's punctuated by bits of shocking violence and extreme gore, none of it is interesting.

Because both movies deal with young FBI agents trailing serial killers, there have been attempts to compare Longlegs with The Silence of the Lambs, but don't be fooled. Lambs grounded its characters in recognizable reality, and offered no motive for Hannibal Lecter beyond pure evil. Longlegs is all over the place trying to build up a mythology so complicated and nonsensical that it becomes unintentionally hilarious. There's nothing scary or shocking about Longlegs, despite those bursts of gore, because it doesn't exist in a world that looks anything like our own.

It's a dumb, dull exercise in "elevated" horror, a freak show that can't live up to the hype.

Viewed August 11, 2024 — AMC Burbank 6

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