Ben Reyes’s review published on Letterboxd:
Ay you fuck you, man.
Choking under the weight of it's own deluded pretensions of depth and grandeur, Os Perkins's Longlegs is basically the pure distillation of everything wrong with the modern "elevated" horror genre, as Perkins confuses opaqeness and obscurity for fear and unease, and produces nothing more than an hour and forty five minutes of time wasted.
It's not that Perkins can't frame a shot, or compose a sequence on a technical level. He can, and it's clear a lot of thought was put into the way the film looks, even if that look is primarily turning every single light avalible as dim as possible. The issue comes in how the film exists as nothing beyond being merely aesthetics, a bunch of interesting visual tableaux, but with no emotional, narrative, or intent meaning to it. It's just imagery, cultivated as if by an artificial intelligence to create a homegenized reproduction of the dozens of analogue horror YouTube videos that are swarming all over the internet. The script reflects this sense of empty artificiality as well, with everyone speaking in murmured, cryptic sentences and eliptical paragraphs that you realize don't actually hold any comprehensive meaning or coherency beyond sounding really cool, while the decision to set it in such a particular time period, namely the Clinton years, ultimately does nothing but provide the inherently odd contrast of Clinton's smiling portrait hanging in the background of the FBI headquarters while people talk about a satanic serial killer.
Maika Monroe, an actress who can provide vivid performances (check out Villains if you haven't), is instead rendered a twitching chihuahua of a character that feels as if you distilled every stereotypical "vaguely autistic detective", and then sucked away anything resembling humanity or genuine emotions. Instead of creating a character, Monroe creates a series of weird expressions and twitchy movements in search of a human to possess. The character never feels like anything other than some tulpa, a listless voodoo doll, which is especially annyoing when the actual dolls seen in the film have more personality. Blair Underwood, meanwhile, is given a more colorful character to play, namely Monroe's boss, who feels like he stepped out of a much more entertaining film, but his performance feels out of step with the self absorbed pretenions this film has with being cryptic and mysterious for the sake of being cryptic and mysterious. The only that actually work are the performances of Alicia Witt and Nicolas Cage. Witt plays Monroe's mother, and Cage plays the titular serial killer, a figure grotesquely overhyped in the marketing, as Perkins sees fit to barely use the element of the film that is arguably the only part that actually works on a complete, top to bottom level. Of course, Cage playing a psychotic freak who paints himself up like a doll and worships Satan is to be expected, but it's obvious that he's having fun in a way that nobody else is, and I deeply wish the film allowed him to take the center stage and just... be the focus of the movie, instead of the easter egg to build an ad campaign around. Witt meanwhile, while saddled with maddingly opaque dialogue and motivations that never seem to really come into focus, is blessed with a natural sense of presence. She absolutely is able to outshine Monroe's performance on every level with just her facial expressions and body language, but again, Perkins seemed keen to only have her in the film so she could look creepy in the trailer, instead of giving her the proper place as the film's cornerstone.
The film's bleak, wintery visual look is amplified by the fact that Perkins and cinematographer Andrés Arochi seem determined to make sure every sequence is lit by as few light sources as possible. Long sequences of the film are almost impossible to decipher as the film is so darkly lit, meaning that visual information that I have to assume is important is ended up lost on under sheets of shadows and greys, while Zilgi's genuinely spooky score is only used in brief moments, and outside of those moments, and two perplexing needledrops of legendary glam rock band T. Rex, the film suspends itself in silence that soon becomes annoying instead of intriguing or unsettling.
At the end of the day, the best part of Longlegs is nothing actually in the film itself, but rather the brilliant advertisement campaign that distributor Neon mounted. You're better off watching the ad campaign and inventing a movie yourself to match it, than actually watching this absolutely inane, brain idling waste of time.
Half a star. Wasted Nicolas Cage's time, wasted Alicia Witt's time, and worst of all, wasted my time as a viewer.
