Longlegs Movie Review: Nicholas Cage is underutilized in a thriller that barely scares

Picture this: You have a nightmare, and it has ghastly humans doing nasty things. You force yourself to move but your leg is caught between railings that have dangerous beings on the other side. Longlegs, starring Maika Monroe and Nicholas Cage can be described in these three lines. At a simple glance, the film is a combination of nightmares that one cannot completely shake off, but it is more like a dream one forgets moments after waking up.

Director: Osgood Perkins

Cast: Maika Monroe, Nicholas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt and Kiernan Shipka

Special agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) wakes up from a nightmare haunted by the ghosts of her past. A long-forgotten past that involves a faceless Nicholas Cage, shrouded in layers of white clothing. As Lee is tasked to find the killer behind the mass murders which has made investigators run around for decades, she is also piecing together the puzzle from her life that was once long buried.

First things first—Longlegs wasn’t what it promised to be, yet it manages to incorporate some interesting ideas. Director Oz Perkins doesn’t hesitate to throw around dead bodies, sometimes in their goriest form. The film offers ample amounts of spooky and creepy scenes. While there is a ton of blood, there are also multiple undecipherable clues and cryptic messages to take a long look at. One thread that ties them all together is that the father is manipulated by someone to murder his own family and is then driven to kill himself.

The film combines elements of classic serial killer films like Zodiac and ties it along with occultist themes reminiscent of Hereditary. Despite the derivativeness, the filmmaker still manages to hold our attention, mostly through the deft cinematography handled by Andres Arochi. The visuals play with lights and shadows while moving through empty houses in alternating grey, yellow, and blue tones. Maika Monroe’s restrained personality shines through as she lets her vulnerability down. Her performance reflects the traumatic place that she comes from and the expression seamlessly changes from fear to commitment, tenacity to agony. Every sound, from Monroe’s breath, and muffled voices, to even the sinister silences, one can listen to everything with intricate detail. But this is where the film triumphs on style, but lets the substance squander.

Nicholas Cage’s identity as the infamous serial killer was kept hidden from the public ever since the promotion, but when it unfolds on screen, it doesn’t excite or instill fear. The biggest drawback of the film is how it fails to utilize an actor like Nicholas Cage and reduces it to a cameo. We don’t see Cage until the first half, but when he arrives on screen, you expect it to be a memorable character that stays with you long after the credits roll. However, it barely creates an impact. His overly melodramatic performance dilutes the rest of the scares. The prosthetics are the most preposterous bit in the film and there is very little Cage behind the cage of fake skin. And then there is a forced red herring that ultimately fades into oblivion.

Longlegs, while attempting to break away from conventional thriller tropes, ultimately bounces off several beaten-to-death story devices like haunted dolls and emotionally manipulated nuns. There is also a sweet mother-daughter relationship between Lee and Ruth (Alicia Witt) but is merely used as a plot device to stir any remaining emotion. Disappointing is an understatement when it comes to this film. Longlegs is ripe with gore that fails to provide catharsis, scares that are not scary at all, and sinister moments that fade out of your memory before they can even be decoded.