Fírinne McIntyre ✒ writing in Being Human.
Spoiler alert
Rating: 5/10
Plot summary: FBI Agent Lee Harker plays cat and mouse with Longlegs as she hunts for the man behind murder.
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| Longlegs: Directed by O. Perkins. |
“Half-psychic is better than not psychic at all.” - Blair Underwood as FBI Agent Carter
Barren, snowy landscapes, cool-toned colour palette, with all the vibes of an underground Indie horror, and almost the feel of a foreign movie, Longlegs begins strong. The trailer helped set it up this way, along with intense praise for its fear-level gathered on TikTok.
Harker and her partner are on the hunt for a criminal, whose location she psychically ‘senses’. I had to catch my breath at the first taste of shock horror when her partner was ambushed. As Harker scours the outside of her gorgeous cabin in the woods for an intruder, we see through Harker’s eyes a glimpse of Longlegs skulking through her home.
Portrayed perfectly, the tension was absolutely eerie, and satisfying for the horror-lover.
Alas, the second half of Longlegs felt like more of a goofy Boo than a Bone-chilling horror.
Keeping its fear-worthy momentum until the movie reached its halfway point, it then lost its magic. Nicolas Cage, while I understand the intention behind his character’s design, did not scare me. I’ll admit, his scene with a girl in a store creeped me out, but there was something a little too clownish about him, and not in the Stephen King sense.
“But your work's over. It's done. And you're gonna be in here for the rest of your life,” Harker says to Longlegs in a standard interrogation room in the all-too-typical fashion of cheap, cheesy horrors.
Harker unintentionally comes across as a petty child playing cop, and as Longlegs begins to praise Satan, the film reveals itself to be a bit of a clichéd letdown. The sense of pettiness in Harker and the Devil being behind Botoxed Cage’s serial killer motives just felt . . . tacky. By the end, there were multiple scenes where I could not help but stifle giggles - and I‘d honestly been clinging to my seat for the entire first half. What could have been the perfect twist at the end didn’t hit above the goofiness.
Fantastically introduced but ultimately anticlimactic, I would rate Longlegs a 5 out of 10.
Half-horror is better than no horror at all.
Fantastically introduced but ultimately anticlimactic, I would rate Longlegs a 5 out of 10.
Half-horror is better than no horror at all.
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| Fírinne McIntyre is a fluent Irish speaker and has recently completed her Masters in Translation Studies. |
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