Longlegs
“Is it scary being an FBI agent?” -Ruby
“.........yes” -Harker
Is it scary following an FBI agent from a safe theater? Yes. What an anxiety and dreadful atmosphere that you live in for 101 minutes. You get to actually experience terror with the characters and feel it, and not just a jump scare every ten minutes. You really feel it to your core. I don’t make movies, but I feel like if you accomplish that as a director, you have to feel like you have done your job. The sound, colors, and filming style all works perfectly together making a magical song and dance. From her first lines, I found myself on the edge of my seat waiting to see what Maika Monroe, who plays Lee Harker, says or does. A lot of people will talk about Nicholas Cage, and I will get to that soon, but this movie was entirely based on the shoulders of Maika in my opinion. She carries the load and makes you feel dread, confusion, worry, or all of it at once. She has been what the kids call a ‘scream queen’ for a while now. I really think this is her coming out party and I think we will see her a lot more in the future, and not just horror.
Now to Nicholas Cage. He was everything you want him to be. Unhinged and unpredictable. He was unrecognizable both physically and audibly (for the most part). He played the role great and created the antagonist this movie needed. Now, talking antagonist, that's where my only real issue with the film comes. I think he helps in creating some smoke-in-mirror situations to drive this plot. The ending has some holes that I think stretch the story thin. Other than a few plot issues, I think the movie was great and has been on my mind almost daily since I watched. Longlegs is a disturbing and thought-provoking experience that will stay with you long after the credits roll. It's a must-watch for horror fans seeking a film that prioritizes dread over cheap thrills.
-J
POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD
As a marketing major, calling your horror movie “the scariest movie of the decade” was a brilliant move, as everyone I talked to about this movie had either heard that or said that to me, and that not piqued my interest but set a certain expectation going into the theater. J, E and I saw this with a group of our friends who are horror aficionado fans, and while we all came out loving it, it was universally a disappointment on the scare factor, which again, may have been propped up by this claim from Longlegs marketing. It was intense, to be sure, though that dissipated at a crucial juncture with Nic Cage’s character, which I can’t disclose without spoiling it, although that in itself may be a spoiler, so whatever, I’ll put a tag above. Some couldn’t get over Nic Cage’s Nic Cage-ness, or his recognizability in this, and maybe I’m too big of a fan of his to be critical enough but I found him utterly unfamiliar, as the prosthetics and framing of him kept him rightly mysterious. His performance was pitch perfect, in my opinion, and I found him wonderfully unnerving. Maika Monroe did excellent as the lead detective, convincingly pulling off the socially awkward savant investigator of the Longlegs killings. The film takes a direction at the end, which did not work for me, it was not a satisfying explanation to all the work we put in to get to, and ultimately was a disservice to Nic Cage’s character, I felt. There were also some elements that felt a bit trope-ish, such as the coded alphabet Longlegs uses at the beginning and in the end felt somewhat disconnected to the larger story. Nitpicking aside, it was a super fun ride, and the performances and intensity make it one of the better movies of the year thus far, and only bested by Late Night with the Devil in the Horror category, which has a ZEJ rating of 8.92.-Z
