Longlegs Review: An Unnerving, Uncompromising Nightmare

Longlegs opens with a station wagon pulling up to a snowy farmhouse, with the aspect ratio of the footage replicating that of an 8mm camera. Despite initially seeming like it is a vintage home movie, the camera begins to pan in odd ways, immediately breaking the assumption that we’re looking at handheld memories from a bygone era. A young girl exits the farmhouse to meet her guest, though that guest plays an unexpected game of hide and seek. When the young girl does confront this figure, their exchange is clearly nefarious based solely on body language, as this visitor identifies himself as “Longlegs.” This opening scene is easily one of the most frightening opening scenes of any horror movie this year, which only sets the stage for the kind of terror writer/director Osgood Perkins is about to unleash on audiences for the next 101 minutes.

A majority of the film unfolds in the early ’90s, exploring how FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) has an almost-otherwordly ability to track down serial killers. For nearly two decades, Oregon has been the target of bizarre murders that eliminate entire families, yet each of them takes on the appearance of murder-suicides. Similar to the Zodiac Killer, the FBI has been receiving letters full of Satanic codes and taunts from a figure known as Longlegs (an unrecognizable Nicolas Cage), with Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) enlisting Harker to use her abilities to get to the bottom of the mystery. 

One thing that has been evident throughout Perkins’ entire career is he will entice viewers with an experience that seems familiar on the surface, only to take it in entirely different directions. With the opening scenes of Longlegs, he establishes the film’s surreal tone and its approach to fear, serving as a litmus test for whether a viewer will join the ride of the dream-like and disquieting narrative or if the movie won’t quite live up to its ominous and effective marketing campaign. 

Perkins’ ability to draw a viewer’s eye with his framing and composition is nearly unmatched in the horror world. Whether it be a farmhouse, a dark hallway, a barn, or a cabin, Perkins manages to keep you both focused on the characters in the frame while your eyes constantly dart to the shadows of a scene to see if they can find clues about what’s really going on. He also uses the camera to create a detachment between the audience and the characters, as nearly every shot features a character in the center of the frame, with their bodies either parallel or perpendicular to its lens. While so many other movies attempt to create framing and blocking that immerses an audience in those worlds organically, Perkins keeps you at a distance, almost as if to imply it would be too dangerous for an audience to be fully part of this world as he creates a more dream-like atmosphere.

Echoing the visual detachment of Longlegs is the script itself, which similarly offers stilted and sparse dialogue that makes every character feel uncomfortable in their own skin. Underwood’s Carter is easily the most realized character in the movie, while Harker, Longlegs, and Harker’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) all speak less like actual people and more like trying to remember conversations you had in a dream. While the narrative is assuredly a horror movie, the overall tone feels more in line with surrealist filmmakers like David Lynch, Yorgos Lanthimos, or Lars von Trier.

Thanks to starring in projects like It Follows, The Guest, and Watcher, Monroe has become a favorite in the horror crowd and for good reason. While some of those previous projects have allowed her to fight back against various threats that have targeted her, Longlegs showcases what’s easily the most frightened and tortured performance of Monroe’s career. Not only is she attempting to cope with the terror this killer is wreaking on the community, but Harker is also attempting to unlock parts of her past that might be the key to finding Longlegs and uncovering the real motivations for his mayhem. It’s almost as if it physically pains Harker to interact with anyone around her, as if this would somehow rope her into the nightmare she feels she’s been living in. Cage’s recognizable face, however, is obscured by facial prosthetics, which allows his performance to speak for itself. Given the heightened tone of the entire experience, some audiences will dismiss Cage’s performance as being cartoonish or silly, though in the world that Perkins has created, it feels like just the right balance of unhinged, intimidating, and childlike.

Between the premise and the setting of Longlegs, it’s going to be hard for audiences to not draw direct comparisons between the movie and seminal serial-killer stories like The Silence of the Lambs or David Fincher’s Seven (with a bit of Zodiac tossed in for good measure). Understandably, seeing a young, female FBI agent being tossed into a case in which she might be over her head, as well as Longlegs‘ ’90s-set storyline, will evoke comparisons to Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, while the serial killer with biblically motivated attacks who teases authorities with cryptic letters that need to be decoded will feel reminiscent of Fincher’s entries in the space. This isn’t to say that Longlegs feels derivative of either of those experiences, more that the cultural impact of those movies is still so significant, it’ll be hard to shake that familiarity while watching the movie.

Where the experience starts to falter is in the final act, which is when all the puzzle pieces of the narrative start to come together. Anyone who’s even seen a trailer or poster for Longlegs has a pretty good idea that the mystery isn’t about who is committing these crimes, but both viewers and the characters want to know why he’s doing these things and how he’s gotten away with it for so many years. Much like how Perkins’ dialogue and camera movements keep a viewer at a safe distance, the reveals about what’s really going on doesn’t feel fully realized. While there’s a lot of allure to be found in keeping details vague and ambiguous, Perkins only does the bare minimum to explain the nature of the horrifying ordeal and leaves a lot to the audience to figure out. In this sense, Longlegs will be a frustrating experience for audiences who want the answers explicitly detailed to them, and even those who enjoy the ambiguity of evil might not be entirely satiated with the explanation of “Satanism…?” The broad strokes and ambiguity of the plot motivations do keep in line with the dreamlike nature of the film’s aesthetic, keeping the answers to the mysteries just beyond reach.

With Longlegs, Perkins continues his trend of delivering entirely singular visions of terror, which started with The Blackcoat’s Daughter and continued with I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Gretel & Hansel. The marketing campaign is bolstering that this movie could quite literally kill you with how scary it is, and while most of us will live to see the movie and tell the tale, what you’ve witnessed isn’t something you’re likely to shake off anytime soon. Even if the ultimate resolution of the story doesn’t fully live up to the breadcrumbs the first two acts of the film set up, knowing that such an unconventional, ambitious, and uncompromising experience that could fall under the umbrella of any generic murder mystery feels like nothing short of a triumph. 

Rating: 4 out of 5

Longlegs lands in theaters on July 12th.