Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Longlegs’ on VOD, an Unforgettable Serial Killer Horror-Thriller Starring a Never-Creepier Nicolas Cage

Longlegs (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is the year’s biggest horror phenomenon: A creepy and effective marketing campaign and the promise of an on-brand-as-ever unhinged Nicolas Cage performance resulted in $100 million at the box office, a huge take for an artsy serial killer thriller with a $10 million budget, on an indie imprint (NEON). It boasts further cred via star Maika Monroe, of It Follows fame, and finds writer/director Osgood Perkins – son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins – jumping from promising horror filmmaker to full-fledged auteur. 

LONGLEGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Note: This movie takes place in a world where Satanism isn’t just hooey bull roar. I think. Something extraworldly is going on here, and it starts in the 1970s with a partial reveal of Longlegs (Cage) greeting young Lee Harker (Lauren Acala) outside her lonely and isolated home in rural Oregon. The tight aspect ratio broadens as we jump to the ’90s, and learn that Lee survived the encounter despite its more disturbing elements. She’s now FBI Agent Lee Harker (Monroe) – perhaps better described as FBI Agent Lee Harker With the Haunted Middle-Distance Stare. What happened 20ish years ago? We’ll get to that. For now, she’s the rare female FBI agent, Clarice Starling-style. In a room surrounded by men. And I think she’s psychic? A serial killer is out there and she and her partner get to knocking on doors and she just feels that he’s in that house over there. And she’s right. 

Next she’s paired with Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), who’s on a particularly troublesome serial killer case: Longlegs. Lee says nothing about her childhood encounter with the man – she either doesn’t remember or doesn’t make the connection or doesn’t want to do either. For decades, Longlegs has been central to a nigh-impenetrable mystery for law enforcement, leaving cryptic letters in Satanic code at crime scenes that are all similar in the sense that fathers murder their spouses and children and then kill themselves – but there’s no trace of Longlegs to be found. Physical, anyway. Psychic, though? Oh man. I dunno. How do you measure vibes and voodoo? “He murders them, but not in person,” puzzles Carter. And so Lee and her somewhat dodgy “powers” are assigned to the case, because this has been going on too damn long and there’s desperation in the air. 

And so Lee gets to decoding the cryptograms and falling asleep on the floor in front of arrays of grisly crime scene photos. Her house is a spartan cabin. Does she have friends? I dunno. She calls her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), who asks, “Are you still saying your prayers?” (Note: She’s not.) Lee and Carter pursue clues that direct them toward some dodgy numerology, occult whatnot and some creepy lifelike life-size dolls of young girls. Now, we saw some of Cage’s visage in the opening moments, but we see it in all its glory not long after, so it’s no spoiler to say Longlegs has a pale, explosion-at-the-plastic-surgery-factory face, the kind of face you don’t forget. And his voice? Piiiiiiinnnnnnched. It seems to fairly accurately reflect the torment happening inside his headbone. We see him out in public at a hardware store and the terminally bored girl behind the register at the mom-and-pop says, “Daddy! That gross guy is back again!” Longlegs, we learn, also really likes T. Rex. What can I say? Early glam rock can be pretty terrific. Inspiring, too. Say what you will about the guy, but you can’t say he has bad taste in tunes.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en and Zodiac are all obvious touchstones, and It Follows seems to bear some influence on the pacing and eerie atmosphere. But listening to my raised hackles whispering, the vibe is all David Lynch a la Mullholland Dr. or Inland Empire.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s always a hell of a ride when Cage comes unglued, isn’t it? Kiernan Shipka turns up in a slightly-longer-than-a-cameo role that chills you down to your mitochondria. But Monroe is Longlegs’ anchor, playing a woman who seems slightly detached from reality, like an alien in a human suit; her solemnity hints at the loneliness, sorrow and depression percolating beneath the surface.

Memorable Dialogue: Longlegs lets rip: “Daddy! Mommy! Unmake me! And save me from the hell of living!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Longlegs is this year’s prominent exercise in laughter-as-defense-mechanism – it’s the only way to cope with a 100-minute submersion in a world where unearthly inexplicable evil can be supplicated by deranged men. Not that the film is egregiously supernatural; the devil lurks in the margins around these here parts. Demons are not conjured in displays heavy with visual effects. They’re visible only within the minds of the characters and audience, all of whom are trapped in this setting, which functions with the incongruity and maddening illogic of a surrealist dream. 

Perkins drops in near-subliminal red-saturated shots of snakes, fixates on Monroe’s glassy empty eyes, forces us to contemplate the decay within people and their settings. The mood is malignant. Voidlike. Poisoned. Hopeless? Maybe, but the protagonists fight the good fight. The tone is so quietly extreme it borders on absurdity, with sets designed to feel cold and empty or sweltering and decaying. Cage is the peak of the rollercoaster, appearing in only a handful of scenes to pluck the one nerve that simultaneously gives you a chill and makes you laugh. 

So it’s a highly effective film, an exemplary creeper uninterested in being neat and tidy. It wriggles out of the grip of easy genre classification, falling into the chasm between occult horror outings and reality-based procedurals. Narratively, it’s scattered upon opening, and comes together and frays apart a few times as the story plays out. The details matter; the details don’t matter. This will trouble viewers who prize orderliness and logic, but atmosphere is Perkins’ emphasis, and that atmosphere is necrotic, spiked with searing imagery and the blackest, bleakest comedy.

This essentially is a movie about compromise in a world where morality is a seed sowed in an arid desert. Agent Lee’s case involves distressing birthday cards, Satanic ephemera, submerged memories that won’t stay drowned. The clues seem to add up, but then they kind of don’t – how can you quantify madness? The madness of a man reflecting the madness of the world? Chaos, as the throw pillow in my family room reads, reigns. And it rarely reigns more ruthlessly than in Longlegs. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sweet dreams, kids: Longlegs is unforgettable, for better or worse.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.