‘Longlegs’ Deceives As a Serial Killer Thriller but Frightens As a Vicious Demon Horror

Osgood Perkins's third film is a surreal nightmare dipped in satanic madness

From its very first scene, Osgood Perkins's third horror feature, Longlegs, heavily relies on our knowledge of serial killers — both real and fictional. The writer-director aims to evoke our memories and fandom of genre favorites like Seven, Zodiac, and The Silence of the Lambs since they all play a role in setting up a narrative that tricks us into thinking we know the type of film we’re watching. We don’t. Every familiar plot element — the obsessed FBI agent, the obscure messages left by the killer, the hidden clues — helps fabricate a disguise that Longlegs dons like a slick cape of dread and terror until its final chapter. It’s all a façade. A masterfully executed pastiche that deludes our senses and prevents us from figuring out where all this twisted nightmare is going before the time is right.

When we learn early on who Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) is, he’s already a fully formed monster. He’s been doing what he’s doing for over 30 years. His MO is established: he kills without killing, a slight resemblance (dare I say “homage”) to Charles Manson. The hunt to catch him is well underway when we join Maika Monroe’s intuitive Agent Harker in the investigation. Regardless, Longlegs is still an unsolved puzzle — thanks to Cage’s unhinged and berserk performance — but there’s something palpably off about his possible motive, identity, and the belief that drives him. Something just doesn’t feel natural in the way that we are used to stories unfolding about deranged murderers.

That’s all by design. Perkins’ horror plays like it takes place in a vacuum, devoid of regular emotions and suffused with unnerving darkness, populated by only a handful of characters who will inevitably connect in one way or another. He effectively (and deliberately) creates a surreal, suffocating atmosphere that is occasionally illuminated by nicotine-yellow lighting but mostly painted with cold and pale colors. In this world, there's no place for sunlight, so we don't see any. Everything we witness invokes a despairing emptiness. Visually, this correlates with the type of palette that many serial killer thrillers use, but here, it serves to bring upon a nightmarish dream we just can’t seem to wake up from.

As we edge closer to the harrowing finale, Longlegs gradually deviates from the conventional narrative that it set up initially to transform into something much more sinister. There's an argument to be made about whether this shift pays off by the end, but Perkins's ambition to flawlessly recreate a specific milieu and then turn it into a different but equally unsettling vision deserves praise from a creative standpoint. See, even if his movie doesn't cohere or shock as much as it wants to with its cold-blooded and wicked twist-ending, its individual parts are both fascinating and chilling enough to suck the viewer in.

That effectiveness, however, also has a lot to do with the star performances that Monroe and Cage deliver. The former's restrained, quietly driven, yet low-key powerful portrayal of Agent Harker essentially provides us with an intriguing and personal character study that flirts with trauma and insanity until the very end. But as perfect as she is in this role, it’s difficult not to be distracted by Cage’s psychotically mesmerizing villain that’s so outrageously over-the-top (even for him) that it seeps through a mountain of make-up with bewildering frenzy. His scenes are so viscerally grotesque and dismaying that you don’t always know whether to laugh or be afraid of him.

That distressing duality is what I keep circling back to after several days of seeing the film and trying to crack why it had such a strange impact on me despite its shortcomings. And I think that may be the answer I’m looking for: Longlegs plays with our nerves and perception emotionally much more than it does with our mind, triggering a gut reaction rather than a rational response. If we solely judge it by that — and not by its trappings of imitating a serial killer feature — the movie achieves what it set out to do.

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