LONGLEGS

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+

We all know Nicolas Cage is in his “I just like to work” era. For some reason, anyone who works with him is also in their “Let Nicolas Cage do whatever he wants” era. It’s that second part that I don’t get—this idea that getting the man is enough. Even a man with massive talent needs creative restraints. Otherwise, you might get a supposedly demonic serial killer with an unnaturally white face singing “Happy Birthday” in a high pitched voice.

Cage isn’t even onscreen all that much in Longlegs. I can’t find a number with an official source, but in a film that’s 101 minutes long, I would guess we see him about twenty of them. To his credit—I guess—he’s certainly memorable in them. I’m just not convinced he’s the right kind of memorable. In a moody horror piece written and directed by Osgood Perkins (Gretel & Hansel), Cage isn’t so much scary as he is ridiculous.

Longlegs feels like a mashup of The Silence of the Lambs and Hereditary, two films that are far superior to this one, which doesn’t take its themes or its genre anywhere new—unless you want to count Nicola Cage playing a killer for the first time. It starts off promising enough, in a seventies winter flashback using an aspect ratio with curved corners reminiscent of printed photos from the time. There are cool transitions between then and the “present” which is the 1990s, where those curved corners slowly expand into a modern, standard cinema aspect ratio across the screen. This includes some nice sound mixing, as with the sound of a little girl’s steps in a few inches of snow.

These clever transitions would mean more if the story amounted to anything more. The protagonist is a very autism-coded FBI agent named Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), hyper-focused on her work and indifferent to social cues. We see her on the phone with her mother a few times, asking how she is in a way that fails to convince us she actually cares. Eventually we see her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), whose behavior is even odder than Lee’s.

I had been a little nervous going into this movie, expecting it to terrify me. Instead, I found myself wondering when it was going to get scary. Perkins has a skill for establishing and settling tone, but here it’s “relatively eerie” at worst, and then Nicolas Cage appears onscreen and you’re left thinking: what? The acting is generally competent, with Cage’s overacting bringing down the averages. The rest of them generally speak in deadpan tones, in a way you might expect from a movie that clearly aspires to be like others that are far better.

I might also have liked Longlegs better without the supernatural element at all, let alone one that brings in life-sized young girl dolls. Whatever happened to good old fashioned psychopaths? Evil people are scary in their own right. That evil is undermined by the presence of demon eyes in shadows. In other words, I really wasn’t feeling it with this movie, which starts off promising and then devolves into derivative nonsense. Longlegs is far from terrible, but at least terrible is potentially more entertaining than average. The many people who have declared this movie great have left me mystified.

Ironically, I did nod off during this dark lullaby.

Overall: C+