Longlegs review: A spooky slideshow in search of a movie

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The early reactions to Longlegs have been almost hysterical in their steel-your-nerves, hide-your-children hyperbole. You’d think people were being fit for straitjackets on the way out of screenings based on how they’re talking about the film. In truth, this doomy occult killer thriller, scurrying into theaters this weekend on spindly legs of breathless hype, isn’t an onslaught of scares. But it does offer its own kind of overkill. Less interested in rattling nerves than slipping under the skin, the movie immediately cranks the atmosphere of foreboding unease to 11 and leaves it there. There’s scarcely a single scene that doesn’t strain relentlessly to give you the willies. If it fails to creep anyone out, it sure won’t be for a lack of trying.

In the early 1990s, a string of unsolved murders has baffled the authorities: Parents turn on their children, as if possessed by a homicidal spirit. Longlegs itself seems a bit possessed. Every moment of this film has a touch of almost pushy malevolence. The camera slowly zooms in on the most banal details with a voyeuristic fixation. The story, cleaved into chapters, lurches forward with sudden stings of cruelly disorienting volume — the transitional equivalent of jump scares. There’s a cursed quality to the indoor scenes, bathed in sickly orange incandescence and filmed to emphasize the tomblike claustrophobia of dens and basements. And the dialogue chokes on dead air, the suffocating silence between words. 

The director, Oz Perkins, has a gift for tuning every aspect of a film — composition, pacing, performance, you name it — to a particular frequency of consuming dread. Right from the opening frames, Longlegs finds him working that diabolical mojo. It commences with an abbreviated 1970s flashback of something wicked this way coming. Perkins shoots his prologue, in which a station wagon parks on the edge of a country home and a little girl comes out to meet the lanky stranger skulking into her yard, in a strikingly boxy aspect ratio. The muted colors and beveled corners of the frame suggest a slideshow of family photos perverted by sudden danger. The movie has barely begun, and we’re already under its spell.

The stranger is the eponymous menace, a mysterious figure somehow responsible for the killings. (He confesses his culpability via letters rife with biblical portent and written in a Zodiac-like cipher.) Is he the heir apparent to Charles Manson, exerting a persuasive influence over the slain families? Or is something more supernatural going on? Longlegs guides us into the mystery with a clammy hand on the shoulder. On the case is Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a rookie FBI agent with a touch of clairvoyance. She’s introduced correctly pinpointing the home of a killer at large, who promptly shoots her partner dead at the front door — an early shock in a thriller generally heavier on mood than mayhem.

Harker is an antisocial, possibly neurodivergent workaholic of cop-movie vintage. She has an uneasy relationship with her religious mother (Alicia Witt), a personal conflict destined to become tangled in an investigation with serious satanic undertones. During one early telephone conversation with Mom, she confesses to not saying her prayers, after which Perkins immediately cuts to a wide shot of a staircase looming behind her, reaching up to a closed door and the less-than-comforting glow of light behind it. Monroe, the perennially haunted star of It Follows, The Guest, and Watcher, makes the heroine’s stock introversion compelling. No modern scream queen better laces fear through curiosity.

Longlegs has the expected flashes of forensic gore, along with visions of savage violence. The most shocking thing about the movie, though, might be how conventional it turns out to be. Beneath the all-out assault of unholy style, this is a fairly straightforward, even derivative manhunt thriller. Perkins cobbles together his story from other touchstones of the genre: Thomas Harris procedurals, classics of cult horror, even the weekly gumshoeing of Mulder and Scully. Harker, whose rapport with her new partner (Blair Underwood) never evolves beyond boilerplate patter, is basically Clarice Starling combined with Will Graham. And the case itself unfolds through the usual corkboard of crime-scene photos and chased leads.

The more the movie comes together, the more it loses its coiling-snake hold over the viewer. It’s no spoiler to say that we eventually meet the killer, and he’s brought to life by none other than Hollywood’s undisputed maestro of oddball intensity and enunciation, Nicolas Cage. With his stringy hair, lurching Slenderman gate, and pasty white features, Longlegs certainly doesn’t look like any character the star has played before. But Cage overdoes the squealing lunatic theatrics, pushing this bogeyman’s psychosis so over the top that it passes “scary” and approaches “campy.” We’ve been primed to meet the devil, and instead we’re faced with … Nicolas Cage, doing some typically uninhibited wild man shtick.

The film, like its villainous star performance, is only superficially disturbing. It’s all creepy effect all the time. What Longlegs lacks is the psychological dimension of the milestones it’s evoking — the feeling of being pulled into the warped mind of either the killer or those chasing him. Silence of the Lambs obviously had that gripping power. So do the serial-killer potboilers of David Fincher, driven by their obscene obsession with obsession. In those movies, we saw evil from the inside. Perkins keeps us on the outside looking in, especially when his distorting anamorphic imagery turns the screen into a fishbowl. We’re not so much immersed in a world corrupted by dark forces as left to tap on its glass.

This is an unusual problem for the filmmaker, whose previous movies enveloped you emotionally in their dark narratives. His debut, a wintry prep-school slow burn alternately called February and The Blackcoat’s Daughter, scrambled the chronology of a satanic awakening, emerging with something oddly sad and sinister. His second feature, the Netflix-holed I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, was even more singular: a whispery ghost story with a strangely literary appeal, made in the key of Shirley Jackson. These were suggestive nightmares, unfashionable even in an age of vibes-forward horror. Longlegs applies their tricks without their restraint. At times, it feels like a series of spooky images and moments in search of a movie. No wonder it’s spawned such a brilliantly seductive marketing campaign.

The last hour of the film descends into a labyrinth of revelations, as Harker’s pursuit leads her down memory lane and into a fresh inferno of understanding. But because we’ve barely scratched the surface of her soul, or the deranged imagination of the monster she’s hunting, these twists pack no real punch; it’s like if Silence of the Lambs never gave us that haunting anecdote behind its title. By the end of Longlegs, Perkins’ blitzkrieg of knuckle-whitening devices, however stylish and arresting, has begun to look like a poor substitute for real terror of the lingering kind. Even if it does get under your skin, its dread is purely skin-deep.

Longlegs is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please visit his Authory page.