A rookie FBI agent investigates serial killings with an occult overtone in new horror Longlegs. It demands to be seen with an audience that can be as pummelled as we were, says Steve Newall.
When’s the last time you saw a scary Nicolas Cage film? One that really chilled? Setting aside Leaving Las Vegas, it’s not super easy to say, is it? Despite his prodigious output and embrace of genre, it’s rare to see a movie starring Cage that does the trick—recent forays into the horrific not raising many, if any, hairs on the back of your neck.
Does Longlegs really star Cage? His name’s up there, but the actor’s been missing from promotional materials. And as the title character, he doesn’t have a lot of screen time—indeed, Cage only shares one scene with the film’s true lead, Maika Monroe (who’s rightfully leaning into this latest movie star moment). But thanks to the dread conjured by writer-director Osgood Perkins here, including an introduction that shocks and lingers, the character of Longlegs haunts this film through deeds, mystery and absence, a skincrawlingly sinister presence even when unseen—mirroring the film’s use of negative space and static camera setups to unsettle.
Cage’s Longlegs dominates the pic in the same way Anthony Hopkins earned both an Oscar and a Guinness World Record (Shortest screen time for a Best Actor Oscar win at 16 minutes) for The Silence of the Lambs. That’s apt for all sorts of reasons. Lambs was a tonal shortcut to telling a deeper story, Perkins told Letterboxd: “How do i help myself in the mission of getting the audience to participate, to feel comfortable, to feel engaged to access this thing we were doing.” Elsewhere in the video he acknowledges that if he’d simply remade The Silence of the Lambs he’d “be in movie jail.”
What Longlegs is doing with the film it resembles in so many ways—they’re both procedurals following a young female FBI agent tracking a serial killer—is using Lambs as a chassis to build a whole new vehicle on. One that adds family secrets, horror elements and Satanic themes to the already sinister elements of the 1991 thriller.
After a chilling opening scene, Longlegs introduces us to rookie agent Lee Harker, “blessed” with both an intense focus bordering on the unhealthy and an intuition so powerful it borders on the supernatural. Harker’s assigned to a decades-long case investigating gruesome family murder-suicides—connected by coded letters signed “Longlegs”, despite bearing no evidence of a perpetrator other than the family members (it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Dr Hannibal Lecter was a master of manipulating others to murder, even from behind bars).
Monroe is excellent as the troubled but dogged Harker, Perkins wisely pairing the reticent youngster with a charismatic superior (the thoroughly charming Blair Underwood). Alicia Witt also serves up a powerful performance as Harper’s mother, initially heard rather than seen, their connection emotionally remote as well as literal.
Cage, though? Wowee. He goes big here, maybe as OTT as we’ve ever seen him even in the boldest of his performances. It’s to Longlegs’ credit not only that a performance this unhinged can sit within its deliberately drably-depicted world and painstakingly executed sense of dread, but its overtly unhinged elements makes the film even scarier. What’s the character capable of, Cage’s turn asks? And what other transgressions—of morals, science, religion or movie rules—can Longlegs the character or Longlegs the film break?
In combining the familiar with the unexpected, in pushing the audience into a state of preconception and uneasiness, Longlegs is a superbly unsettling horror pic. Some of its moments are big, sure—others function to build an accumulation of details that stick and bind together in dread. Its deeper themes deserve explorations that would be outright spoilers in a review like this, as would discussion of the intriguing plot mechanics or film’s revelation(s), and I have no doubt you’ll find much you’ll want to discuss when the lights come up. Suffice to say, Longlegs screams out to be seen with an audience that can be as pummelled as we were—by one of the scariest films in ages.
