When mastery of aesthetic meets slavish desire to over-explain. Longlegs is the most disappointing film of 2024 for me, even if it's far from the worst. Oz Perkins has mastered minimalism in previous films, especially the dreamy Gretel and dreary Blackcoat. Those pictures relied on context and obfuscation - a lack of reliability on part of the central script. The latter was especially gutting because it took a few days to unpack what the context and causation before it really hit me how bleak it was.
Not so here. Longlegs takes the age-old FBI procedural and uses it to unpack Perkins' misgivings with how mother treated his father, among (of course) other things. That perspective, from his interview with People, helped me at least understand some value or meaning here. The film is a spookhouse of things that the director's mother finds objectionable, unmentionable, terrifying. Glam rock and long hair, men with high-pitched voices that love children. All the while, really, it's the good Christian mothers perpetuating the most evil. It's a non-stop onslaught of things that would ostensibly make the film unwatchable to Perkins' mother, and for that, I applaud him. Art that would drive away those who compounded our traumas the most is vital for recovery and growth.
If that's all Longlegs was, I reckon I'd enjoy it more. Unfortunately, this is lost amid a script that disrespects the viewer's time. Lingering conversations and dry, clinical explanations for things that can't be explained or rationalized. The supernatural is not only demystified, but given names and rationalized to the point of being totally ineffectual. The child death isn't scary, the demons aren't scary, the serial killer himself isn't scary. The scariest part is Alicia Witt, who does wonders here as ever and really sells her role. Ditto for Maika Monroe, whose doe-eyed, panicked, escalated turns makes her nerve-shredding descent into the unreal at least believable. It's just a shame the script couldn't sell it with these two excellent actresses.
Cage's performance is what hampers the film and everyone involved in it. It's a joke. A good actor who I've spent most of my adolescence and adult life defending has become a one-trick pony, only able to jack himself up on the fumes of decade-old memes. Where's the nuance of Adaptation, the subtlty of Las Vegas, the pathos of Vampire's Kiss, the convincing fuddy-duddiness of Big Daddy in Kick-Ass? Absolutely fucking nowhere to be found here. Renfield was even acceptable, but strangely enough, there was more humanity to his comical Dracula than this guy. Several scenes of his performance made me burst into laughter, which made me very, very happy I didn't see this in a theater. Hate to be that bitch, you know?
Longlegs gets so lost in its dry, plodding, 'A to B' plot that Perkins loses focus of his own pain and hurt amidst it all. What could be unsettling is just mildly upsetting, and what should be scary is only unsettling. Some disconcerting imagery - Cage's battered skull, the early FBI death, the staged crime photos - make the film at least worthwhile as a mood piece, and of course, Perkins is a craft master. Hopefully, that craft will be leaned on more in his next picture, and not a script that insists an answer to the unanswerable.