The first thing you see is a house inside a boxy frame with rounded edges, like a 16 mm home movie. It’s winter, Jan. 14 to be precise, and a young girl is turning nine years old. She thinks she’s alone, but then a man approaches. He’s tall. So tall that the top of the frame cuts off his head. He apologizes for his “long legs” and proceeds to bend forward, bringing his grotesque face into the frame before the movie abruptly cuts to black and the title: Longlegs.
This opening is the memory of Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a clairvoyant FBI Agent. Her superior, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), calls it “heightened intuition” and recruits her to solve a series of familial murders. Each bears the mark of a serial killer who leaves behind cryptic notes with the signature Longlegs, but none give the impression of an outside presence. They all look like open-and-shut cases of murder-suicide with the father as the culprit. Carter needs Harker to see what others can’t. And she does: Each of the murders took place around the daughter’s ninth birthday.
How does Harker deduce this? Longlegs slips her a note that allows her to crack his code. Is Carter suspicious that Harker immediately decodes something no other agent could? Maybe. Or maybe he hired her because of her proximity to the suspects. Clarice Starling wasn’t the only agent who joined the bureau to bury a past trauma.
Written and directed by Osgood “Oz” Perkins, Longlegs is a formally rigorous murder mystery that enjoys keeping its frames dark and its characters immobile. Not that anything corporeal is holding them at bay; they seem frozen by what they suspect might be unfolding in front of them. When I tell you Longlegs attacks families when little girls turn nine years old, your mind is liable to go to a very dark place. Where Longlegs goes is also dark, just not in the way you might expect.
For that reason, the film comes off a lot more like a terrifying provocation than a creepy haunted house. I won’t give away the motivation or the intricate structure of Longlegs’ murder spree, because you probably wouldn’t believe me if I did.
What you might believe is that Nicolas Cage’s performance as Longlegs is one of the most unhinged things you’re likely to see this summer. Cage is known for going the distance when it comes to his roles, and in Longlegs, he has the facial prosthetics and vocal modulations to prove it. At first, you might think it’s too much for a moody mystery with tingles of the occult. But as the story rolls on, you realize Cage has perfectly calibrated his performance, and it’s the story that might be too much.
Perkins’ movie is scary, but in a specific way and probably for a specific segment of the audience. Back in 2009, Paranormal Activity similarly divided viewers by predisposition. For those who believed in supernatural spirits, Paranormal Activity was terrifying. For those who didn’t, it was a lot of dull surveillance camera footage. You can say your mileage may vary when it comes to these kinds of movies, but couldn’t you say that of every movie?
Longlegs suffers from a similar reliance, both in form — the movie feels suffocatingly composed even if the cinematography from Andres Arochi looks really good — and a preexisting fear that there’s a particular source of evil somewhere in the world that can crop up anytime and for any reason. If this is a fear you also share, then Longlegs is bound to be terrifying. If it isn’t, then you might be wondering why certain characters don’t react just a little bit quicker.
ON SCREEN: Longlegs is playing in wide release.