Longlegs (2024)

The recent horror joint Longlegs is uneven but has its points. Is it worth seeing? I don’t know. It’s a serial killer picture and, even though I get the feeling it is looking for comparisons to The Silence of the Lambs, it’s actually much closer to Zodiac, with a killer, Longlegs by self-designated name, who somehow provokes family murder-suicide slaughters from a distance and then taunts police with cryptographical messages and evident knowledge of the murders held back from the public. This puts the idea even closer to Charles Manson, although that comparison is dismissed by investigators in the picture. Longlegs has done in double-digits numbers of families this way. The FBI has been investigating because no one is quite sure how he’s doing it, or even if he is. The forensics mostly don’t support it. But his taunting does. It’s an intriguing mystery that holds our attention. The FBI investigators include Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who, in many ways, has the stock flat affect of a neurodivergent person. She also appears to have psychic powers, which she wants to deny. But she knows things and can’t account for how she knows them. They run her through batteries of tests. She’s psychic all right. Meanwhile, over in the coincidence bargain bin, Harker’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) is a blood-of-Jesus evangelical who might have something to do with the case and certainly appears to have something to hide. She is just a little too interested in it. Nicolas Cage as the devil-worshiping Longlegs has pulled yet one more basically original, manically insane character out of his big bag of tricks. He chews the scenery in a somewhat restrained way here, wearing a woman’s wig, but make no mistake. He is chewing the scenery as usual—it’s his stock in trade, his whole shtick at this point. How do I keep ending up at his movies? But he’s well deployed here by director and writer Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, low-key but worth a look). The narrative at large, however, is a bit of a muddle, unable to decide whether it’s about serial killing or devil worship or why not both? Or maybe family trauma too, with the long face. It’s full of too many cheap jump-cut scares, but arguably that’s the kind of stuff we’re here for anyway and thus we deserve it. I never spill drinks anymore at these things.