A distractingly outsized performance is one of many unsuccessful elements in Osgood Perkins’ stylish yet progressively silly horror
n a rather gloomy period for the horror film – a string of commercial misfires causing some to question the usually profitable genre’s long-life reliability – the promise of nightmarish killer thriller Longlegs has felt like a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
Perkins has long shown a preference for style over substance, from 2015’s underwritten debut The Blackcoat’s Daughter to his thin yet visually effective take on Hansel and Gretel, his films heavy on atmosphere and light on all of the other stuff. Longlegs follows suit, but within the even less welcoming framework of a 90s-set Silence of the Lambs-adjacent FBI procedural.
When Perkins keeps us in the dark, similar to the ads that have preceded, Longlegs has us in its grip, even if mostly through technique. He prods and pokes with insidious sound design and flashes of nastiness and gives us a puzzle we’re eager to see finished. But then the big reveal of Cage’s killer – kept visually from trailers – crash-lands and any intrigue or even vague belief in the world that Perkins has created evaporates.
What’s most damning about Longlegs is that for all of its attempts to pierce our sleep and make its way into our nightmares, nothing sticks . Perkins achieves two visceral shocks, but nothing achieves that pit-of-your-stomach fear that truly lingers. In trying too hard in the moment, Longlegs is awfully shortsighted.
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