Okay, I’ll admit it. Perhaps my expectations were a little too high, I really enjoy this director, and I have been hanging for a Copycat/Se7en/Silence of the Lambs type film for a while now… Why did all the good ones come out in the 90s??
However, the caveat to that is that the friends I attended this film with had no such expectations, and were still just as disappointed, confused, and annoyed by this film as I was.

I’ll backtrack, Longlegs, ostensibly about a serial killer, but kind of not really, is the latest film from Wunderkind Director Osgood Perkins, he of The Black Coats Daughter (excellent), and Gretel and Hansel (an acquired taste but one that I enjoyed).
It features Nicholas Cage in the kind of flashy over the top performance that he is famous for, but this is taken to the next level because he’s also playing a serial killer. This is the kind of performance that people talk about years later, positive or negative makes no difference, you’ll find people won’t discuss this film without mentioning him and his performance.

Maika Monroe is neurodivergent FBI agent, Lee, and Monroe, who gave great performances in It Follows and Significant Other, manages to command the screen with what is essentially a ‘straight-man’ role, she packs a lot of discomfort and confusion onto her serenely expressive face. Alicia Witt is here in a truly odd performance as Lee’s mother Ruth; whilst Blair Underwood makes a welcome return to the screen as the world-weary FBI agent Carter, who Lee is assigned to work with on this most peculiar of cases – Underwood bringing the gravitas and realism sorely needed in a film that seems to revel in the bizarre.
Essentially the storyline is the same as most serial killer/crime films, some murders happen and agents are assigned to investigate the case and discover the killer. The difference here is that we are saddled with characters that it’s hard to empathise with. We essentially know who the killer is from the outset, and Perkins apparently decided that serial killers aren’t scary enough, and needed to add in some devil worshipping, creepy doll, supernatural tomfoolery as well.
After an extremely strong opening that was both chilling and intriguing, this film had nowhere to go except down and I’m sorry to confirm that that’s exactly where it went.

Though Perkins clearly has a great wintery vision and an austere aesthetic that is put to great use here, he is clearly not great at worldbuilding.
There is no explanation as to why the FBI is suddenly involved in this case, it is told to the audience that this man has been killing people for several years but when and how it went from the police and to the FBI is never explained, stuff like this annoys me because it could easily be resolved with one or two lines of dialogue, it’s lazy to not bother.
The FBI was prioritising serial cases at the time that this film was set (though the timeline is dubious as it doesn’t quite add up, but we’ll leave that for now) because they had newly discovered profiling, and yet here they are with a fresh serial killer just perfect for profiling, and we never see any of that actually occur. It definitely would’ve happened and would’ve been passed on to the agents in charge.
For a serial killer this prolific I question whether they would put an oddball rookie on it, surely there would be some sort of task force.
She’s also an unreliable narrator and a questionable hero, she hides evidence, she doesn’t share information with her partner, she is very close to the case and this seems to be common knowledge though it doesn’t stop anyone from allowing her to go alone into an interrogation room with the prime suspect, yeah right.
Many storylines are picked up and then dropped unceremoniously such as Lee being psychic, such as the ‘coded writing’ so very Zodiac, and why is he called Longlegs?
And how on earth did someone so clearly troubled make it to the FBI, let alone so high up the investigation? They surely would have done research on her family and background.

The link between the various supernatural elements such as the dolls, the birthdays, and the transvestitism is never properly established.
There are many random scenes that just break up the narrative and lead to nothing of worth.
And when will filmmakers learn that if you want to make a supernatural story, we need to believe in the reality of where it’s occurring first.
If I don’t believe in the FBI part, if I don’t believe in the looking for a killer aspect, if you can’t explain to me how a killer could be aware of random children’s birthdays etc., then I’m not going to accept any supernatural story you lay on top of it.

Ultimately this is so disappointing because the parts that are good are really good, but if I walk out of the film with 20 questions, none of them answered by the narrative, then that’s a failure.

5/10