‘Longlegs’ Teases Dread, Horror, and Maybe a Little Silliness

Osgood Perkins knows a thing or two about crafting dread-filled horror, and his feature directorial debut, 2015’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter, is all the evidence you need of that. The film oozes oppression, foreboding, and the presence of something truly evil, and it all builds to a brutal, emotionally devastating finale that leaves this horror fan grinning ear to ear. Two lesser films followed, one a dry slow-burn (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, 2016) and the other a competent YA fairy tale (Gretel & Hansel, 2020), but now Perkins has finally returned to the realm of overwhelming dread with his latest movie, Longlegs.

Something dark is at work in the Pacific Northwest. Families are being destroyed through murder/suicides committed by supposedly good fathers, and the only thing keeping authorities from suspecting mental maladies or Seasonal Affective Disorder are the notes left behind signed by someone named Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). The crimes have been happening for decades, but the investigation finally heats up when a young FBI agent named Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) joins the team. She’s shown a peculiar ability to identify and find madmen, and it’s not long before she’s zeroed in on Longlegs. Unfortunately for her and everyone around her, though, finding the man only opens the door to hell even wider.

Longlegs fumbles some elements, from its lead villain to the ending itself, but there’s more than enough here for fans of The Blackcoat’s Daughter to celebrate and revel in. A serial killer thriller sewn up with horror-laced threads, the film’s atmosphere is deliciously suffocating as it makes clear that the calm is always at the mercy of brutal bursts of violence. The promise of safety — in your home, with your loved ones, under the mercy of god — is a goddamned lie, and both Longlegs and Perkins want you to know it and feel it in your bones.

The inspirations here, whether intentional or not, are both notable and noticeable. Scenes and themes feel lifted in spirit from bigger, meatier thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Zodiac (2007) — it’s the 90s, and Lee is surrounded by taller male agents, and one early sequence sees her moving with a near-panicked intensity through a killer’s lair. There’s also a sibling-like feel, from tone to superfluous beats, with Jonas Akerlund’s much-maligned Horsemen (2009) and Sean Byrne’s The Devil’s Candy (2015). That said, and more than anything else, the film feels most like a Perkins joint, one where meticulous, attractive cinematography is met with an equally meticulous slow-burn of a pace. Perkins wants you to sit in the dark, nervously scanning every inch of the frame for the evil you can feel nearby, and there’s an unsettling thrill in doing just that.

Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi find perverse beauty in the ugly, malignant world of Longlegs. From the grotesquerie of abused and maggot-riddled corpses to the dead eyes of dolls made to resemble young girls, images are presented mostly without the noisy distraction of shock cuts and jump scares, and their power is irrefutable. Perkins still resorts to the jumps on occasion, but he uses them effectively to unsettle even as we can’t help but lean closer in the hopes of seeing around the corner or above the frame. Sound is equally effective in the things we hear and the things we don’t, and the use of T. Rex songs from the 70s finds terror in the tunes that was never intended.

While the atmosphere in Longlegs is terrifically effective at slowly squeezing your soul, the story itself begins to falter as more of Perkins’ script hand is revealed. An opening scene is milked for a later reveal that shouldn’t surprise anyone, and details around the killing feel equally obvious despite later attempts at surprise. The murders all happened to families where the daughter’s birthday falls on the fourteenth of a given month, and when it’s casually dropped that two characters here have upcoming birthdays not a single person stops to think, “hey, I wonder…”

While those details begin to weaken the third act, Longlegs is firing on numerous cylinders until then. Monroe’s horror bonafides are well-documented with the likes of It Follows (2014) and Watcher (2022), and she delivers another quietly compelling turn here. Lee is a soft-spoken and insular woman with a damaged childhood at the hands of a misguided mother, but her determination is palpable. A terrific Alicia Witt goes against type as Lee’s mother, a woman with her own sacrificial pains, and it’s a performance that balances both sadness and chills. An equally strong Blair Underwood appears as the agent who brings Lee in on the investigation, a family man with his own burdens, and it’s a far from flashy role that he makes shine. The smallest amount of screen time with the biggest impact, though, belongs to a brief appearance by Kiernan Shipka as the only survivor of a Longlegs murder scene two decades prior. It’s an incredibly disturbing performance that might just sit with you longer than anything else.

Cage’s presence as Longlegs may well be the big draw for some viewers, but it should be noted that he’s a supporting player here. His presence if felt throughout, but he’s not actually in very much of the film which is actually for the best. His performance exudes an unsettling and dark sense of fun, a wickedly creepy turn that leaves you both fascinated and disturbed, but the more time we actually spend looking at him the less unnerving he becomes — between his heavily makeup-caked face and his vocal pitch, he quickly comes to resemble a post-botched plastic surgery Tiny Tim. There’s a reason the film’s opening is its most frightening as Longlegs is kept to brief flashes or just out of frame.

Longlegs, ultimately, is a chiller that excels in crafting and maintaining an atmosphere that wants nothing less than to convince you that all is lost and safety is an illusion of the cruelest kind. It’s heavy, mean-spirited horror, at least until the specifics of Perkins’ hellish vision come into the light and simmer the highs down to some minor devilish fun. Scary, best of the year material? Nah, but it’s absolutely a film that will stick with you with images and ideas you won’t soon forget.