Longlegs (2024) | My Experience With The Wrong Expectations

This isn’t exactly going to be a review of the Oz Perkins’s film Longlegs. It’s more about my experience with this film some 24 hours after watching it.

Initial Reaction

When I left the theater, my initial reaction was …meh. As I was walking to the car I was thinking “What was the point?” On the plus side, I really enjoyed the cinematography and the set design. It was beautifully gloomy and dreamy. The performances by Maika Monroe and Alicia Witt were great. They gave it their all. It was also good to see Blair Underwood again. I thought Nicolas Cage‘s performance was average good Cage. I wasn’t blown away but I also think this movie is completely less without him. Cage is always good in his own way even when he isn’t trying.

The first act set up was really creepy. I loved it. It kept me anticipating something that never arrived though. Some reason and understanding. That was disappointing for me. I wondered if there wasn’t something I was missing about all this.

24 Hours Later

I kept thinking about the movie. What went wrong?

Expectations. The marketing sold me something that wasn’t on the screen. That same marketing that turned the film into a big hit also lied to me. I am in marketing and know that’s part of the game but I like to market in an honest manner. This movie was sold to me as Silence of the Lambs and this movie was NOT Silence of the Lambs. It was sold to me as a the scariest movie ever and this movie was not that scary. My expectations were all wrong and it soured my screening experience.

I jumped onto YouTube to watch a couple of videos on what people thought the film was about. I came across a few that completely changed how I felt about Longlegs.

Longlegs is not Silence of the Lambs. Longlegs, when viewed through the lens of literary classics like Dracula or Faust, starts to come more into focus. I was so focused on what they sold me I missed out on what they served.

Once hearing this explanation and looking back on what I remembered, the entire film seemed to change in my mind. The symbolism and the journey of the characters started to make more sense. The main character is named Lee HARKER, for God’s sake. From pacts with the devil to the “moral decay” that can come with spending too much time investigating the darkness of this world. The clues were there the whole time.

I felt so dumb.

Understanding where the filmmakers were coming from, I think going back and watching it a second time will be a far more interesting experience.

And this is not to say that maybe Longlegs isn’t just a bad movie. Maybe it is.

In many ways I can compare it to the Phantasm movies (at least the first two). They aren’t great movies from a writing or filmmaking or even acting standpoint, but I still enjoy them. They create a world pulled from other creative endeavours that still stand on their own but they require a bit of personal imagination to really appreciate, if that makes sense.

Maybe the simplest way to say it is it’s a good bad movie. I look forward to watching it again sometime soon and seeing it with fresh eyes.