Longlegs (2024)
Longlegs: One Year Later | 4/5
Written by Noah Dietz: 7/12/2025
“I don’t think the bureau has a division for nice things.”
One year ago, I was fully bought into the hype around Longlegs. The first trailer I had seen hardly even said the name of the film; it was just pure uncomfortable atmosphere. I spent an afternoon looking for the trailer I remember, because surely it can’t just be the fifty-second trailer I found, right? That trailer must have lasted an easy three minutes, it was the most uncomfortable trailer I had seen in theaters since I was a kid. But it wasn’t, and that’s the kind of impact the early promos for this had. I was over the moon about how cool the marketing for this one was. From the first thing I saw till about a month out, we had some incredibly hands-off trailers that just set a tone. I didn’t need to see anything real about the movie, the atmosphere was enough. As the trailers went on we got a more conventional one, but even that wasn’t a great issue. Sure, it didn’t really capture my imagination like the first few did, but it was still in the vein we had already started. Then the studio got more involved.
After that, we got bombarded with a style of advertising I always associate with middling Netflix films. You know the ones, all it can talk about is how “people are *literally* dying at screenings of this movie!” and “we hooked up a heart monitor to each audience member, and their average heart rate was 170 bpm.” It’s the kind of artificial hype that people who are even slightly critical can see through a mile away, and more importantly it’s the kind of hype that cheapens any value the final piece will have. How many times have you watched a movie that was marketed as “the scariest movie since The Exorcist”? I’m sure it’s happened to you more than once, as it’s a frustratingly common point of advertisement anymore. People who fall for it are disappointed, and people who don’t end up holding a grudge against a film they would be otherwise excited to have seen. It’s a case of mis-marketing that’s different from what we’ve had in the past. Instead of marketing a movie in a way that it isn’t, we’re leaning too far into what something is. Equally as disappointing, equally as damaging to the reputation of the film, but now your most annoying friend will just tell you that you didn’t get it, and if you didn’t think it was that scary it’s a you problem.
But that’s enough of that. I’d rather talk more about the film itself rather than the unfortunate marketing bungle.
NEON
From the moment Maika Monroe hits the screen as Agent Lee Harker, you can’t escape the feeling that we know more about her than she does. You know something is wrong, but you also know she has no clue what that is, if she’s even aware of an issue. It’s a dark cloud hanging over her every action throughout the story that manages to simultaneously evoke full confidence in everything Harker can do, and a tremendous fear of what is going to happen when she finally reaches the end of the line. The uneasy feelings we have become heightened whenever she’s talking to Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), and especially with the asylum visit with Carrie (Kiernan Shipka). Her world is constantly unraveling, and all we keep hearing is her mother on the phone, quietly asking “are you still saying your prayers?” Perkins manages to deftly maintain a feeling of wrongness across the entire length of the film where you can’t help but sit and wonder what, if anything, has ever been truly normal for Harker.
On top of this we get how Oz makes the movie look and feel. The various locations we visit all feel lived in, or suitably abandoned, with the muted color palette conveying there is truly no joy in the world. One of my favorite areas we get only moments in, Longlegs’s “lair”, is a bit of a surprising spot simply because of the saturation of color it has. The whole world, from the T.Rex poster on the wall to the doll workbench, is bathed in gloomy, red light. A suitable home for the man downstairs. Contrast that with Ruth’s cluttered, gray farmhouse or Lee’s sparsely filled, warm wooden cabin. Even Carter’s fairly cookie cutter suburban home stands with a clean separation from the rest of our locations, everywhere having its own distinct voice. A world that feels a little familiar, but still fundamentally wrong. This is to say nothing of the hidden devils that appear on screen. Did you find all of them when you watched it? They’re incredibly fun to look out for, adding a sort of emphasis to the scenes they’re present in.
None of this atmosphere would have landed without our superb supporting cast in this film. Of course Nicolas Cage is fantastic as the titular Longlegs, but Blair Underwood conveys an fervent support of Lee and command of the scenes he’s in that you can’t overstate. Between his and Alicia Witt’s performance as Ruth Harker, our backing line is more than enough to flesh the rest of the film. While Underwood owns every scene Carter is in, Witt manages to feel like Ruth is hardly aware of the world around her. Yet, as the story unfolds, we see there’s much about Ruth that we aren’t aware of, adding to the specter hanging over the rest of the film. The balancing act of all our characters' secret ambitions is a little shaky sometimes, but I don’t feel like it’s enough to actually hurt my overall enjoyment of the film.
I haven’t even touched the ARG experience that was happening along with the subpar later promos, but if you’d like to see some more of the crime scene photos we get a glimpse of here, or maybe just some of the cypher puzzles from Longlegs himself, that’s a fun hole to dive into. Like I said, we had some really good promotion for this movie, so it’s a shame the hype-based viral marketing angle cheapened it.
I’ve said last year that, if you enjoyed Silence Of The Lambs, you would enjoy Longlegs. I would like to more specifically now say that you will likely enjoy Longlegs if you enjoyed the 1981 novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. Personally I found this to be a wonderful spiritual adaptation of that story. Longlegs isn’t perfect—in fact, I was just talking to a friend of mine about how we didn’t quite think it fully stuck the landing. I’d love it if we added more of the FBI work with Harker; the procedural work outshines a lot of the other scenes we get, but it’s still a damn fine thriller that we don’t get many of anymore. That said, this is one of my favorite films to come out last year, and is far from the worst thing that you could watch if you’re having fun with modern horror.