Longlegs Review: One Of 2024’s Best Movies Has Arrived, And It Will Haunt You

Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs will haunt you. I know this because I have been haunted. First coming out of seeing the film, I was impressed by its unrelenting atmosphere and exceptional performances… but also, the movie wouldn’t let me go. While I didn’t experience any nightmares, my mind constantly drifted back to the dark space of the work in the days that followed, replete with disquieting memories of Nicolas Cage’s horrifying physical transformation and reflections of the story’s disturbing turns and conclusions. After less than a week, I inquired about getting to see it again, which I did, and I have plans to see it a third time as soon as possible.

I am haunted by Longlegs in that I am captivated by it. It has familiar parts, but it’s unique in how it makes you feel both while you’re in it and removed. It sticks fingers in the folds of your brain and does a nice bit of mushing, and it’s a remarkable expression of what it is that I love about horror movies. You might be seated in a comfy chair, eating some candy, and watching a rapid series of images projected as light on to a screen, but it nonetheless fucks with your amygdala and leave you uneasy about the world. It sets its tone immediately and never interrupts its devotion to evoking terror.

Following past outstanding work in the genre with films like The Guest, It Follows and Watcher, Maika Monroe advances her growing Scream Queen legacy as Lee Harker, a young FBI agent in Oregon hunting killers during the Clinton administration. When a surprise bit of psychic intuition leads her to capture the target of a manhunt, it’s decided by Agents Carter (Blair Underwood) and Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) that her skills may be useful in a case that has been puzzling authorities for years. There has been a slew of family murders, and while there is never any direct evidence of outside influence, they are all linked together by two things: the celebration of a child’s birthday and letters left at the scenes written in cypher and signed “Longlegs.”

With nothing else in her life beyond the voice of her mentally adrift mother (Alicia Witt) on the other side of a phone line, Lee’s mind falls deep into the search until it literally comes home to her. As she works to decode the messages from Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), investigates past crime scenes, and interviews the lone survivor of the serial killer’s spree (Kiernan Shipka), however, her discoveries get more and more disturbing, and she begins to recognize the rules of reality as she knows them bending around the case.

Longlegs is 101 minutes of dread, accomplished with intense cinematography and a gripping mystery.

While it’s trendy to dismiss jump scares as cheap nowadays, Longlegs opens the gates with an amazing example that sets the tone for the whole piece. A young girl living in a remote house on a snowy day is surprised to see a strange car parked on the property, and as she approaches it, gets turned around and confused by a mysterious “cuckoo” call. When the child does finally find the stranger, he appears suddenly, sending your heart into your throat, and half of Nicolas Cage’s shocking visage is obscured by the top of the frame. He coos excitement to be with the “almost birthday girl,” but laments having brought his “long legs.” With a curious, “What if I...” this goosebumps-inducing presence begins to bend his knees – and the scene cuts to black-on-red credits, driven by the grungy/psychedelic sound of “Jewel” by T. Rex.

It’s a diamond-sharp hook that pierces you and keeps you deeply locked in for the next 90-minutes of your life.

Osgood Perkins further evolves the dark aesthetic of his previous features, and while his script will quickly draw comparisons to The Silence Of The Lambs (with a bit of a push provided by the period setting), the narrative is matched it with a green, brown, and grey-heavy pallet reminiscent of David Fincher’s work and evokes connections to Zodiac and the series Mindhunter. It’s grounded and steely vibe itself sells a realistic serial killer-centric mystery, but influencing the audience to keep a foot planted in that assumed reality allows the movie to trip you up and slam you down with its shocking explorations of great evil.

Expertly navigated, the movie even has the pre-internet setting add an extra layer of spookiness; even putting aside the growing presence of the supernatural in the film, computers and cell phones taken out of the mix has the effect of heightening Lee’s isolation and making her investigation more tactile as she gets hypnotized by the files and crime scene photos that she spreads out on the floor in front of her.

Maika Monroe’s pathos-filled performance drives up the stakes, while Nicolas Cage’s transformative turn shows he still has the capacity to seriously surprise.

One of the movie’s most fascinating choices is foregoing the typical tough-as-nails FBI agent trope, and it’s incredibly effective – in large part because of Maika Monroe’s outstanding performance. Lee Harker is smart, determined, and capable, but she is also far from ignorant about the horrors in the world in which she lives, and her professed and expressed fear is palpable and contagious. In the movie’s most intense moments, as she pulls out her gun and stalks around for threats, her breathing is heavy and loud, and her fear becomes our fear as she carefully turns corners and sees demonic, shadowy forms in the night. Monroe’s performance is full of atypical choices, and it’s exceptional.

Nicolas Cage’s turn is a completely different beast entirely and unlike anything we’ve ever seen before from the actor (which is impressive unto itself given his decades of big screen ubiquity). With his ghostly pale complexion, stringy white hair, gaunt features and pitched voice, Longlegs is a ghoulish, unpredictable and terrifying presence, even when Osgood Perkins is only allowing us fleeting glimpses and obscured views – and the ultimate reality is that while he doesn’t actually do all that much, his presence and appearance alone is chilling. Cage has made many great contributions to horror cinema throughout his career, including his starring role in last year’s Dream Scenario, but it can be said immediately and without hesitation that this is the part for which genre fans will forever remember him.

While I found myself with a couple of gripes about plot developments in Longlegs following my first screening of the film, they dissipated with my second, as while there are some conveniences in the story, they are forgivable in light of how the movie plays with the nature of evil and the supernatural. At the end of the day, I haven’t been this captivated and stunned by a new horror release since Jennifer Kent unleashed The Babadook on the world a decade ago, and like with that movie, I don’t expect it to stop haunting me for a long, long time.