Despite Nicolas Cage's Superlative Performance, Longlegs Falls Short On The Horror Game

THERE IS A SENSE OF SOMETHING ALWAYS LURKING just outside the frame in Longlegs, the new horror film from Osgood Perkins. Dread grows into a sinking feeling of a predatory presence waiting at the edge of perceptible reality. The offscreen space forces the imagination to fill in the gaps. When the camera pans leisurely in the dark of night, the eyes go searching for a silhouette, a clue, even a barely distinct shadow so the evil at least has a form. There is an odd relief in knowing the monster isn’t some disembodied evil preying from the shadows. Daylight brings its own horrors. When the sun is out, it is easy to get lured into a false sense of security. Wide shots make those in the crosshairs feel naked against potential threats. There is no hiding, no escape.

Not when the threat is a ritualistic serial killer played by a wigged-out, talcum-powdered, rasping Nicolas Cage with prosthetics, wardrobe and eccentricities borrowed from Pennywise the clown and glam rock pioneer Marc Bolan. Looking to stop Longlegs is scream queen Maika Monroe as rookie FBI agent Lee Harker. Between Perkins, Cage and Monroe, the film is sure operating with a lot of horror cachet. Cage needs no introduction as a genre comrade with a lifetime membership. Monroe has made a career out of dodging evils of all shapes and sizes, starting with the sexually-transmitted curse of It Follows (2014) to a serial killer stalking the streets of Bucharest in Watcher (2022). All the times she tried to run away from the monsters strike as vital experience — on CV at least — to hunt one for a change. Lee’s surname Harker may recall the conscientious lawyer who descends into the lair of evil in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But she isn’t the only one here with a familiar surname. The horror pedigree runs deep here with the director himself being the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins. As a child, Osgood Perkins even played a young Norman Bates in the 1983 sequel.

All the cachet and pedigree are no guarantee of an out-and-out horror triumph. Longlegs works best when it taps into the Satanic panic of the 80s and 90s. But for all the promotional hype we have been drip-fed for months, it doesn’t quite deliver on its promise of a serial killer procedural. Taking figurative cues from his previous film Gretel & Hansel, Perkins drops one too many breadcrumbs in woods already deforested by the likes of Silence of the Lambs, Insomnia and Zodiac. Meaning you know exactly where the film is headed. Not to suggest this is a copycat. Only that it doesn’t carve anything new into the body of the genre to consider it a milepost.

Call it simple deduction, hyper-intuition or ESP. There is no denying Lee has an uncanny gift. On her very first day in the field, she manages to find the house in which the target of a murder investigation has been hiding. It’s this gift that the seasoned agent Carter (Blair Underwood) hopes will help solve a series of murders that has mystified law enforcement for years. In each case, a father snaps without rhyme or reason, killing his wife and children before taking his own life. So far, ten families have met the same tragic end. The puzzler? There is no sign of forced entry, no DNA, no trail whatsoever at the scene of the crime. Save for one curious detail: a note left behind, written in code and signed “Longlegs.” The fact that Longlegs is able to get the fathers to kill on his behalf without any evidence of contact gives the mystery a supernatural dimension. The question is: can Lee solve a mystery of tenuously tethered clues on the strength of her abilities alone? How will she respond when one of the clues points to a link to her own childhood trauma?

As Lee sifts through old case files to make sense of it all, Perkins puts us in her unsettled headspace. 9-1-1 calls play over grisly crime scene photos. Subliminal flashes of Satanic symbols and visions of blood-red serpents scar us in brief seconds. Scenes of maggots feasting away on rotting corpses and possessed dolls opening their dead eyes will make us all recoil. Warped murmurs, door thuds and all the ambient sounds woven delicately between dialogue and the score saturate the atmosphere with a suffocating sense of foreboding, far removed from the primitive jolts of most frightfests. Perkins’ direction feels cued to the destabilised syncopations of Lee’s troubled soul. One moment, Lee is struggling to solve the occult puzzles. The next, a figure watching her from the dark leaves her a birthday card with a gift inside: a key to crack the puzzle. A once-stalled investigation picks up further steam when Longlegs’ only known survivor Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka) provides her an important clue. But will it be enough to catch Longlegs before he adds another innocent family to his body count? The investigation reveals, among other things, the metastatic nature of evil and its ability to corrupt good ordinary people into doing something horrific.

In a performance vibrating with feeling and understanding, Monroe brings a wounded depth to a woman who has not confronted her childhood trauma because she only half-remembers it. Lee has good instincts and intuition for a detective but seems to find the most basic human interactions challenging. When her boss Carter invites her home to introduce her to his family, the awkwardness creates tension in itself. Her struggle to make conversation with his young daughter Ruby is comical at first. But the disarming moment of the two seated on the bed is permeated by a feeling of how easily this safe space could be violated. All of Longlegs’ victims too were once families, typically happy or unhappy in their own way, until their sense of security was destroyed forever. Reluctant phone calls and a brief visit to her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), a deeply religious woman with a hoarding disorder, hint at an anxious young woman with a stifled upbringing.

Framed in 4:3 ratio with rounded edges, the Polaroid-esque prologue finds a station wagon approaching a farmstead where a young girl and her mother live. When the girl sees the vehicle through the curtain in her room, she steps out to the snow-covered yard to catch a glimpse of the person inside. We see a creepy man whose head stays out of frame. She doesn’t know him, but he seems to know her, calling her “the almost birthday girl” and singing about “longlegs.” We don’t need context to realise this is a man with no good intentions. When he bends down and screams, the film cuts to the title card. Perkins teases glimpses and bides his time before unleashing a deranged Cage on us. Among all the wildcard characters Cage has played in his career, Longlegs deserves at least a top 5 spot. Because it is positively intoxicating to watch a performer operate on registers both hysterical and frightening at the same time. When he visits a hardware store, a young clerk reacts to his buffoonery like he is a harmless neighbourhood drunk. When the camera spies on Lee through windows and doorways, there is no doubt as to the demonic nature of the evil permeating the film.

Rather than resort to big reveals and exposition, Longlegs could have benefited from leaving us unmoored in a psychological maze. If not for its miscalculations, it could have been the kind of horror movie that tends to linger in the mind. It could have evoked the feeling of an urban legend about a bogeyman whispered first-hand while asleep, remembered in hazy images and plagued by an arresting sense of needing to stare into the darkness to ensure there isn’t something lurking within or outside our frame.