phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2024

Longlegs



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 41m
Country: Canada, USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Crime, Horror, Thriller
Plot Summary: In pursuit of a serial killer, an FBI agent uncovers a series of occult clues that she must solve to end his terrifying killing spree.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Immaculate vibes. What if David Lynch had made a satanic Silence Of The Lambs? Every frame is careful composed to be as unsettling as possible, and the cast gives excellent performances. Nicolas Cage walks the razor’s edge of weird and scary without teetering into camp. Maika Monroe is so tightly wound, it’s like she lives under an ocean’s worth of pressure. Alicia Witt is a raw nerve. My only complaint is a late-movie exposition dump that explicitly explains what’s going on. It’s unnecessary; there are enough breadcrumbs dropped for attentive viewers to figure things out and, really, it’s more about the Lynchian atmosphere, anyway. If you just chopped out those 5 minutes, this would be a fever dream masterpiece.


Outside Reviews:

Brian Tallerico
2.5 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

Everything about Osgood Perkins’ "Longlegs" is designed to rattle you, unsettle you, and make you think about it hours or even days later. It’s a very purposefully exaggerated film, from the oppressive sound design to the heavily mannered performances, going for something closer to a cinematic nightmare than anything approaching realism. To that end, despite obvious narrative influences, comparisons to Jonathan Demme’s "The Silence of the Lambs" feel a bit off. Sure, there’s a female FBI agent and a serial killer, but Perkins is seeking something different tonally. It’s basically like watching the scene where Clarice hunts around the storage unit in the dark for 100 minutes. There’s little room to breathe.


Matthew Jackson
A - The masterfully unsettling Longlegs creeps through a rotten world

Directed with textured, precise control by Oz Perkins and led by the ice-and-fire lead performances of Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, Longlegs sets out from its opening frames not to root us in the ordinary, but to show us a world glazed over with malignance. Everything about it, from the performances to the production design to the sickly quality of the light in scene after scene, is designed to make us not just question what we’re seeing, but stand at a remove from it, like we’ve just seen a wild animal behaving strangely. Like that wild animal might just lash out and bite us if we get too close.