Pitched as a “modern Silence of the Lambs,” given a killer viral marketing campaign, and twenty-two million dollars at the box later, the sprawl of Longlegs is bigger than anyone could have imagined, but is the movie worth the hype?
Set in a bleak Oregon, Longlegs follows rookie FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she’s brought on to assist with a decades-long cold case after demonstrating she may have psychic abilities.
The case at hand, that of an elusive killer (Nicolas Cage) who leaves coded messages signed with a creepy moniker from which the film derives its name, has gone unsolved for so long because all the crime scenes present as patrilineal murder-suicides at first.
Aside from the messages left behind, there is no evidence that Longlegs himself has been inside any of the houses where families have been brutally slain.
There has to be an answer, Lee’s new boss Special Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) insists, something they’re not seeing, but what he and Lee don’t know is that she is the key to the truth.
Deeply unsettling in its imagery and sound design, Longlegs is a masterclass in cultivating dread. Leading up to the film’s release, not one of the trailers revealed the killer’s face.
Even when we see Longlegs for the first time in the film, it’s just for a second, an awful flash that leaves the audience uneasy and wondering—wait, did I see that right? And sure enough, you did.
Every carefully chosen detail makes it impossible to relax into watching the film, which is not an easy feat.
However, the deep attention to detail lent to the aesthetics was not equally spent on the plot.
Lee’s first encounter with the killer comes at her own home while she’s on the phone with her mother, what seems like mere hours after she’s been brought on to the case. How does Longlegs know who she is so quickly?
Soon it becomes very clear why, but during the scene, one that would have been otherwise terrifying, you’re left distracted, wondering how it all escalated so quickly from visiting just one cold case house. It feels like a gratuitous jump.
Consider this your warning, ample spoilers ahead.
While visiting Lee at her home, Longlegs leaves another note, the contents of which allow her to crack his code, revealing the messages left behind at the other crime scenes.
This inspires her to look closer at another clue: all of the victim families have daughters whose birthdays were on the fourteenth of the month (just as Lee’s is) and every murder took place within a few days of their birthday. Lee transposes this information against a linear calendar and realizes that it creates an occult symbol.
Two points along the symbol’s shape are missing which means they can expect Longlegs to kill again. Lee calls this his “algorithm” for killing, and undoubtedly, this logic, which both Monroe and director Oz Perkins were said to have worked together on at painstaking lengths, is one of the coolest elements of the film.
What else she finds in the letters is a repeated reference to one of the murders, that of the Camera family, an instance in which the daughter of the house was away when her mother and father were killed.
Lee and Carter go to re-visit the scene, and it’s here they find a large doll, a life-like replica of the daughter who survived by luck, Carrie Anne.
They go to visit Carrie Anne in the mental hospital where she lives only to learn Longlegs beat them to it, signing the visitor log as Harker. Carter begins to suspect there’s a connection between their suspect and his ace detective.
Which there is. Lee Harker goes home to visit her strange and deeply religious mother discovering evidence in her childhood bedroom that she, too, had been visited by Longlegs as a girl—a Polaroid she took of him when he trespassed on their land.
Lee turns this over to Carter, and they use it to bring him in. However, when the interrogation begins, Lee and Carter are convinced he’s not working alone.
At this point, we do get one of the coolest scenes in the film in which Lee Harker attempts to interrogate Longlegs. It’s the scene everyone was hopeful for because Neon released the audio of Maika Monroe’s heart rate while filming it.
And it’s understandable why her pulse topped out at one-hundred-seventy beats per minute. Nicolas Cage is terrifying. His makeup is unimaginably grotesque, and his voice is indescribable. It’s truly hard to watch him.
But—then he kills himself. Longlegs smashes his head on the interrogation room table until Lee Harker is painted with his blood. It’s shocking, and yet, anti-climactic.
He’s hardly the menace he seems like in the trailers, and ultimately, his character and the fantastic acting that goes with it serve as little more than a strange and ugly face.
If Longlegs was truly the modern Silence of the Lambs, a serial killer with such detailed lore and grandiose personality wouldn’t be so easily discarded.
There’s no cat-and-mouse with Longlegs, and the relationship between him and Lee is underdeveloped when holding it up to that of Hannibal Lecter and Clarisse Starling.
And with the death of Longlegs, the rest of the film unravels. The suicide leaves Agent Carter even more suspicious of Lee, which, in turn, inspires her to go home and confront her mother.
There Lee finds a doll replica of her childhood self, and all the pieces of the puzzle click into place. Decades ago, when Longlegs came to kill Lee and her mother, her mother made a deal to save their lives: Longlegs could live in their basement making doll replicas with the power to possess the fathers of his targeted families and she would carry out his bidding by dressing as a nun and making the deliveries.
Lee’s clairvoyance is not clairvoyance, but instead the influence of her own doll’s black magic.
It's a letdown. Especially in the final scene when Lee’s mom delivers a possessed doll to Agent Carter’s daughter for her birthday. Why is she still so desperate to carry on his work after Longlegs is gone?
If the murders are so important to Longlegs, why was he insistent on delivering a message to Lee that would help her decode all the others left behind at the crime scenes?
(This is how Longlegs knew Lee was involved, by the way, but even that doesn’t add up.)
Lee’s on the phone with her mother while Longlegs is slinking around the house. She hadn’t even told her mother that she was assigned to the case at that point.
And don’t tell me we’re supposed to believe that’s also thanks to the doll). Ultimately, Lee’s mother’s need for continuity runs counter-intuitive to Longlegs’ need to be caught. Decades worth of terror unravel in one week. It seems all for naught.
In the end, we don’t learn anything about the Longlegs either—why dolls? Why is he called Longlegs? Why does his face look how it does? What’s the connection between his mutilation and fixation with little girls?
There is so much that Lee would have had to bury in her subconscious for her to not remember the man who lived in her mother’s basement, and a three-foot American Girl Doll is meant to be the answer to that.
It’s a little deus ex machina.
Regardless of the weak plot, Maika Monroe shines. If not already, she’s undoubtedly cemented herself as a bonafide scream queen.
She portrays the neurodivergent Lee Harker with nuance and humanity, so well that it’s been written about at length by Jamie Alvey for Morbidly Beautiful here.
In the end, she makes the movie, and while it’s not what’s expected, it’s worth the watch.
It’s fun and scary and atmospheric, but unlike the collective expectation for it, in time Longlegs won’t cast a long shadow.
Longlegs will fade.
