Longlegs
Samuel Ribeiro

Review by Samuel Ribeiro

Longlegs 2024

★★★½

Watched 26 Aug 2024

First of all, I gotta say that the marketing stretched, almost to the point of impossibility, all the hype that can be given to a movie. More was impossible.

It's not uncommon, specially in Horror, at least once a year, see campaigns about a certain movie saying "yeah, this is the one", "sure, this one is the real deal".
This year's movie (at least until now) seems to be Longlegs.

Starting by that, in fact it has many similarities with movies like The Silence of The Lambs, in its cat and mouse chase between the serial killer and the female FBI agent in the best Starling's introverted style, trying to prove her worth before her peers, the killer's enigmatic notes, like in Fincher's Zodiac, to the way in which the murders seem to occur, in a kind Kurosawa's Cure.

But no. Longlegs is not the best final product about serial killers in a crime thriller since Lambs. That one remains Seven in my book.
And I think that one of the main reasons is that after a certain point, the movie simply leaves aside what it had done well until then and takes a slightly different path, wrapping all up in a third act that felt quite anticlimactic to me, and in a way, it kinda wasted the title character, who in my opinion could have gained a quite considerable status here in this movie, and be among some other characters associated with Horror movies from now on.

Not doing so, all we got were some momentarily striking and a bit shivering parts of him, in a very good performance by Cage with a generous dose of madness and eccentricity that seems to suit the actor so well.
Maika Monroe is also very convincing as the introvert and antisocial FBI agent, who seems to always carry with her a very heavy emotional strain, linked to her distant and religious fanatic mother played by Alicia Witt, super convincing in her generous doses of creepyness too.

The entire aesthetic of the movie is very well achieved and spot on imo, I really liked the use of a poor, shady lighting in some scenes, giving the movie a dark and uncomfortable atmosphere, supported by a minimum but efficient score.

Bottom line, for me Longlegs is a good movie yes, but it's not THE movie I was expecting it to be, mainly to the third act which seemed a bit anticlimactic to me, an easy and kinda sloppy way to finish.

2024 Ranked boxd.it/sAdog

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