Niko Ramses’s review published on Letterboxd:
It’s rare to watch a film as uncompromisingly committed to its own malevolence as Oz Perkins’ Longlegs is. This is a film that actively despises its audience and revels in the idea of instilling dread within them. In fact, Longlegs takes great pride in doing so.
There is an uncomfortable evil that lurks in the peripheries of Longlegs; one that slowly eats away at you until it is all-consuming, leaving nothing but a hollowness in place of all other human emotions. It's the sort of feeling that is best experienced as opposed to described. It might start with a look or a shadow in the corner of a room, but you soon notice Longlegs’ deliberate framing of shots, one that highlights an abundance of negative space as opposed to a singular person or figure. And yet, despite there being nothing tangible to interact with in these spaces, a presence is certainly felt; a presence which cannot be discerned or manifested physically, but only through the thought of its mere existence.
Contrastly, there is, at times, an emphasis placed on individuals through extreme close-up shots. However, none of these shots ever come across as remotely human. Take, for instance, Nicolas Cage's titular character Longlegs. The majority of the serial killer’s screentime is spent obscured, with only parts of his face being shown for the longest time. While the illusion of fear is eventually broken when his entire face is revealed (with prosthetics that make Cage look like Jennifer Coolidge - I would have loved to see her in this role come to think of it), the lasting impact of Longlegs’ framing techniques casts a lasting emptiness and overall inhumanity across the film.
While Longlegs maintains an aura of mystique and intrigue with regard to its ambient horrors, Perkins’ film relies too heavily on these externalities. For all of its masterful malice and deliberate manifestations of otherworldly horrors, Longlegs loses itself in its plot. Severely underdeveloped, Longlegs’ story has little bearing. Beginning as a police procedural drama akin to Se7en or Zodiac, the film unravels into a supernatural oddity full of dolls and demon balls that make about as much sense in the narrative as they do in this sentence given the restrained bit of context I've provided for their inclusion in the film. There are, of course, explanations for these plot devices in the film, but the extent of these explanations work to undermine the initial intrigue provided by the supernatural and occult underpinnings of the film while also failing to provide a satisfactory conclusion for the procedural aspect of the film. As opposed to our protagonist coming to discover these truths for herself as she did earlier in the film when decoding Longlegs' cipher, the audience is presented as a monologue that explains all the remaining mysteries of the story. What's worse is that the protagonist is not even conscious when this exposition dump occurs. For a film whose (stellar) marketing campaign revolved around its ambiguity, the lack of care that was put toward its narrative was disappointing to say the least.
A film like Longlegs is certainly rare and Oz Perkins has certainly mastered his craft with regard to developing an unnerving audio-visual landscape. Neon should also be commended for its decision to distribute a film of this caliber and pairing it with the marketing that it did. While the film may not have exceeded the expectations that this ad campaign promised (I think you'd be hard-pressed to believe it even could), Longlegs will be a film that's remembered, if only as a repressed and haunting memory, waiting to be unlocked so that its evil can take shape and consume you once again.
