No, I Didn't Like Longlegs

Longlegs feels like a very self-important film built around an idea that becomes sillier the more you think about it.

The marketing promised a nightmare, but what Longlegs delivered was a slow, gloomy investigation that never becomes as clever as it thinks it is.

Spoilers ahead

Good Points

• Decent atmosphere and visuals

• A few moments of genuine unease early on

Bad Points

• Extremely slow pacing with little payoff

• The central plot becomes increasingly absurd

• Nicolas Cage

• The twist

• The ending

The marketing was better than the movie.

Now, I am too old in the tooth to believe marketing or the nonsense promises films sometimes deliver, but, naturally, it creates expectations before the film even begins.

Here, the trailers carefully avoided showing Nicolas Cage’s character, as if his face alone might be too disturbing to reveal, and you go into watching it expecting something that just doesn’t deliver.

Now, that’’s not the films fault of course, but it also doesn’t help when the film ends up being a mess, either.

Most of the film is just waiting.

A huge portion of the movie consists of FBI agent Lee Harker, played by Maika Monroe, quietly standing around while people talk about murders, where apparently she has an unusual intuition, too.

In practice, that mostly means she occasionally guesses things correctly while the other agents react as if she’s solved a brilliant puzzle, because god damn, someone has to otherwise the movie would have been even slower and duller.

Scene after scene involves staring at crime scene photos, walking through houses, or sitting in shadowy offices while ominous music hums in the background, and yes slow horror can absolutely work when it builds dread, but it doesn’t work when the film seems to mistake stillness for tension, and when it mostly repeats the same gloomy mood again and again.

Eventually that mood starts to feel like stagnation.

The plot collapses the moment you think about it.

The deeper the story goes, the harder it becomes to take the central idea seriously too, as the murders are ultimately connected to porcelain dolls containing strange metal spheres tied to satanic forces, and these objects somehow influence fathers to murder their families.

The film treats this revelation like a horrifying discovery, but personally, I mostly found it ridiculous, and what makes the idea even harder to accept is the method used to deliver these cursed dolls - a nun brings them to the families.

Which means the entire plan relies on households happily accepting large, deeply unsettling porcelain dolls into their homes without asking questions - imagine someone knocking on your door holding a life-sized antique doll that looks like it belongs in the most cursed shop imaginable.

It’s impossible to believe.

Nicolas Cage

The film also spends a lot of time building anticipation for the appearance of Nicolas Cage as the mysterious killer, and when he finally appears, the moment is clearly meant to be terrifying - but it’s just odd.

Cage whispers nearly every line of dialogue, and at random moments he starts singing snippets of songs, while other times he makes small noises that sound like he’s entertaining himself.

The whole effect though was just mostly distracting - the rest of the film maintains a grim, hushed tone while he behaves like a character who wandered in from a surreal theatre performance, and that contrast just makes everything feel incredibly awkward.

The twist doesn’t carry the weight it should.

The emotional core of the story eventually revolves around Lee’s mother, as the film reveals that she has secretly been delivering the cursed dolls for years in order to protect her daughter.

Now, that revelation should feel quite tragic and devastating, but it lands with a thud, where the film spends so much time building atmosphere that it barely develops the relationship between the two characters, so when the twist finally arrives, it feels rushed - like the story suddenly remembered it needed some emotional stakes before the ending.

And after all the slow pacing and heavy atmosphere of what came before, we get a final act that resolves the story surprisingly quickly, where there’s a confrontation and the cursed doll suddenly becomes important again.

And then the film simply ends, and we get a conclusion that is so incredibly unsatisfying, especially after such a long buildup, and when a movie spends most of its runtime creating tension, the final payoff should feel enormous.

Here, it’s just silly, like most of the movie itself

It takes itself far too seriously.

The biggest issue I had with Longlegs though is how seriously it treats its own material - every scene is drenched in gloomy lighting, characters speak in hushed tones, and the camera creeps in on empty hallways and shadowy rooms as if something profound is unfolding - but the story underneath all that atmosphere isn’t strong enough at all to support the weight of that tone.

It all ends up feeling like a very self-important film built around an idea that becomes sillier the more you think about it.

Final Verdict

I have watched Longlegs 3 times - once on the big screen, and twice streaming with people who hadn’t watched it before (Not my film choice for those 2 evenings) - and each time I just feel more disdain and frustration for it.

As I do believe a good movie is underneath it all waiting to come out.

Or maybe not.