Jump scares are to horror what farts are to comedy: They are inarguably effective but arguably the lowest-hanging (magical) fruit. The highest echelon of terror fare comes when audiences aren’t temporarily afraid but deeply disquieted. Longlegs ain’t packed with jump scares. It is silent but deadly. It is gonna disquiet you. It’s gonna disquiet the hell out of you. The trailers understandably sold audiences on a Silence of the Lambs parallel, but that FBI thriller feels like a children’s bedtime story by the time Longlegs is through.
We are introduced to FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) on a very bad day that will become merely a bad day after her next few weeks on the job. Within the first few minutes, writer/director Oz Perkins makes it clear that this isn’t a typical crime procedural. Harker is tested for psychic abilities and then assigned to a cold case. Her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), describes the hunt for a unique serial killer. He’s unique because he hasn’t actually killed anyone.
For several decades, coded letters signed “Longlegs” have been left at the scene of mass homicides. Specifically, the notes are found after a father has gone cuckoo-bonkers, murdering his wife and daughter. Longlegs was never in the home. How does he do it? Why does he do it? Those are good questions, as are “Oh God, what is that thing?” and “Is Nicolas Cage doing some kind of Donald Trump drag?”
That last one may seem out of line, but it really isn’t. Longlegs is a movie about a weird-haired very white dude who talks with his hands awkwardly and gets people to do completely inappropriate and illegal things. Politics explicitly haunts the film almost as much as Satan. Okay, Satan does do more haunting, but photos of Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon are hella prominent. To be clear, this isn’t a “message” or “agenda” movie, outside of a clear agenda to make you feel very, very uncomfortable.
Writer/director Oz Perkins has officially ducked under my mental velvet rope and entered the VIP section of my brain reserved for the best directors working right now. He’s a perfect 4/4 in crafting wildly upsetting, slow-burn, absolutely gorgeous-looking horror gems. This is so easily his best. Creepy exchanges of dialogue are interrupted by oddly hilarious moments. And then oddly hilarious moments are interrupted by genuinely grotesque sequences. It’s fun for everybody in that it is fun for nobody.
Cage is a great fit, even if his over-the-top nonsense feels a bit too easy and borderline distracting. Still, Perkins uses him sparingly to great effect, letting him walk right up to the line of goofy annoyance. Monroe turns in a career best. Her seemingly brittle but ultimately unbreakable character is endearingly mousy and breathtakingly competent. She does a lot within a small range, and the ominous conclusion relies heavily on her ability to “look too long.”
From Satanic panic to dolls that make M3GAN look like a tickled Elmo, the best comparison I’ve come up with for Longlegs is that it feels like what would have happened if the first season of True Detective embraced its supernatural trappings. What a delightfully wicked, gloriously disconcerting, near-perfectly-executed frightening fable.
Grade = A
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Siddhant Adlakha at Mashable says “The further it goes on, the more it fails to capture the eye, or the imagination — let alone both in combination. Altogether, Longlegs is an empty film; not in the sense that peering beneath its surface reveals a terrifying void, but rather, in that it betrays a lack of meaning altogether.”
Kate Sánchez at But Why Tho? says “Like in his other films such as Gretel and Hansel and The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Perkins understands exactly how to push his audience to fill in blanks—and how we fill them becomes a mounting dread that tightens slowly. With an eye for architecture, doorways and windows capture the characters that live in their center.”
David Gonzalez at The Cinematic Reel says “Longlegs is a masterclass in horror and storytelling. Prioritizing tension, characters, and atmosphere, it’s a masterful blend of thought-provoking storytelling and ‘art house.’ It’s unholy. It’s unnerving. It’s surreal. It’s Oz Perkins’ magnum opus.”