In 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. Teased with an intricate campaign of the likes we rarely get in this era – withholding, drawn out, artful – buzz grew from online whispers to in-cinema screams with early reactions suggesting a bold and terrifying new original was here, sleep be damned.
Some of that promise does manage to creep onto the screen, almost all of it within the first creepier half, but writer-director Osgood Perkins, son of Psycho’s Anthony, just can’t quite edge his film into the territory it so wishes to be a part of, nestled alongside both recent indie breakouts like Hereditary and The Witch and truly cursed classics like Ringu and Possession. This isn’t Perkins’ first shot but it’s his biggest swing and ultimately his clumsiest miss, a grab bag of ideas and tricks that can’t be coerced into anything resembling a whole.
