Longlegs Review: Nicolas Cage delivers an unhinged performance ...

Writer/director Osgood Perkins began his filmmaking career with The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), which gave a chronology-confounding, gender-switched, somewhat Satanic spin on the Psycho films that made his father, the actor Anthony Perkins, famous. He followed this with the moodily haunting ghost story I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House (2016) and the feminist fairytale retelling Gretel & Hansel (2020). His latest, Longlegs, perhaps most closely resembles his debut (and also briefly features that film’s Kiernan Shipka), and like all his films focuses on a female protagonist – but it is very much its own beast.

While loosely borrowing elements from Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991), David Fincher’s Seven (1995) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997) as much to confuse as to clue in the viewer, it remains elusive and hard to pin down – although let’s just say that the title’s twin associations with ‘daddy’ and a spindly, spidery kind of predation will eventually play out.

‘Cuckoo’ says Longlegs (a heavily made-up Nicolas Cage, in a performance unhinged even by his own standards) as he plays cat and mouse with a little “almost birthday girl” (Lauren Acala) around her house in the snow – his face remaining half out of shot as though the frame can barely capture him. This opening scene, set in the early Seventies, is shown in Academy ratio (with rounded-off corners) – but by the time we are in the present day of the mid-Nineties (when Satanic panic was still in full swing), a more conventional wide-screen presentation kicks in, and from here on, only occasional flashbacks will return to a squared-off frame to mark the difference between past and present, childhood and adulthood. Here memory looks like a period-appropriate 16mm home movie, in a film that is preoccupied with the diabolically dysfunctional dynamics within ordinary-seeming domestic situations. There is even a family featured here whose surname is ‘Camera’.

When it is discovered that rookie FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) has the ‘half-psychic’ gift of clairvoyant intuition, she is partnered with family man Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) to help find the serial killer Longlegs, who has been at large for decades, and whose signature appears on cryptic messages left at horrific scenes of domestic murder-suicide even if there is no evidence that Longlegs himself was ever there. Lee follows a trail of bizarre clues that appear to have been left just for her by Longlegs, and that lead ever closer to home, where her religious mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) roosts on the memories that she has hoarded.

While the ensuing mix of coded letters, creepy dolls, and creeping dread barely conceals a subtextual legacy of domestic abuse, gaslighting and PTSD, the film never reduces itself to this reading. For propelling the story is a pervasive sense of the irrational and the uncanny, where everything feels alarmingly wrong. This effect is created in part by the insidious sound design, by the DP Andres Arochi’s canted angles, by the dazed panic that Monroe’s performance embodies, by some very disorienting cuts from editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng, and by Danny Vermette’s brilliantly skewed production design (even the wood-panelled atrium of Lee’s own home is utterly, if ineffably, off). Mostly, though, it is the film’s full commitment to realising something that simply defies reason, so that viewers, though easily able to follow what they are seeing, are still left struggling to understand or cope with this demonic assault on the senses.

“There’s nothing in there,” is how a forensic examiner describes the metal ball that he has found embedded in a realistic homunculus recovered from the scene of a cold case. His words might as well serve as a summary of the film, where investigative logic is brought into collision with vacant, echoing nihilism. Yet here, amid all the chilly emptiness, resides a pure, nearly palpable kind of evil that is seldom seen in today’s cinema, and that, like that sphere, lodges itself in the head and proves very hard to get out. For as all these characters are being forced to play to someone else’s mean-spirited script, domestic nests are cuckooed, no one is a free agent, and ultimately Perkins himself is the master manipulator and the real devil.

Longlegs will be released in UK and Irish cinemas on 12 July