Knee-jerk review: "Longlegs"

1. The unsettled creepiness of the trailer for this movie did the trick.
2. Nicolas Cage is over the top as usual.  They hid his face - heavy with strange prosthetics - from all the promotional material, which certainly upped the curiosity factor, but what we imagined turned out to be far scarier than what he really looks like.
3. Definite echoes of Silence of the Lambs, of course (newbie female FBI agent brought in on a disturbing serial killer case) but if you're going to steal, steal from the best.
4. The tone of the whole thing just feels... off-kilter.  Eerie.  A low hum of dread. 
5. That doesn't mean the filmmakers are above employing a few traditional jump scares accompanied by a screeching music cue.
6. Lot of long takes and wide angles that makes one anticipate something's about to happen.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it's a fake out.
7. In other words, it's the kind of movie where a character sits alone at night researching scary things (our heroine apparently can't work on this case during the daytime) and the camera's pointed at them in a way that you can see an open window or door behind them.  So you're crawling out of your skin expecting something awful to appear in that window or door.
8. We've never seen Blair Underwood this gritty and terse.  Isn't he usually playing some variation of the suave charmer?
9. Things get stranger and stranger as the story unfolds.  The final reveal about what's exactly been happening with these serial murders is completely nuts.  But that's usually the case with these kinds of things (see also: most of Stephen King's novels).  The set-up is so weird and scary that there's no way to plausibly explain it all away.
10. We discussed the ending with the 15-year-old Fry on the drive home, trying to puzzle out some of the character choices at the end.  We thought we understood the rules of what was happening.  But then maybe not?  We finally decided this sort of movie is about mood more than plot.
11. For us, there's nothing scarier than someone knocking on your front door in the middle of the night.
12. The odd "longlegs" name we think is explained in a quick line of dialogue during the first encounter with the Longlegs character, but we didn't make it out.  He says something about how he didn't bring his long legs.  What the heck.  (UPDATE: apparently, the gag is that he's towering over the little girl he's talking to - using long legs - so he squats down to better communicate.)
13. The film geek in us 100% loved the gimmick of using a square aspect ratio to signal the flashbacks.
14. Obligatory scene of characters exploring a dark, scary place with flashlights.
15. A couple of allusions to T. Rex's "Bang a Gong."  No idea why.
16. If nothing else, it was a memorable experience.

Tweet