HORROR; 1hr 41min
STARRING: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt
Long way down: Monroe
The chill is on from the frosty opening frames of writer-director Osgood Perkins’s menacing spin on slaughter, snapped into leering focus by a grotesque man (Cage as Longlegs) wishing a little girl (Lauren Acala) a happy birthday that will doubtless be anything but.
Moving right along to the 1990s and FBI agent Lee Harker (It Follows’ Monroe), whom the bureau has classified as a potential clairvoyant, is tasked by her flummoxed boss (Underwood) with investigating a gory series of Oregon-based family murder-suicides. Spanning decades, the killings are orchestrated, per their cryptic, occult-themed calling cards, by a killer calling himself Longlegs. The impossible twist: Longlegs was never present at the crime scenes, so how in the literal hell did he trigger the gory deeds?
Lee is a tense loner with zero social skills. This could figure given her disquieting line of work, only you sense there is more to her innate rigidity and guarded relationship with her devout mother (Witt) than the immediately creepy. She is also a first-class code breaker, deconstructing Longlegs’s obscure messages to establish a framework for his stage-managed homicides, which were all committed by the fathers and occurred around the ninth birthday of a girl in each family. The pattern of deaths forms an inverted triangle with one date missing. Whatever this means, it cannot be good.
Well, no, it’s not. The more twisted a horror rabbit hole becomes, the more hypnotic it’s perversely likely to be — and since twisted is what Longlegs is all about, the less said about its lower depths the better. Cage is the freak show that fans will be hoping for. But it’s Monroe as the locked-in Lee Harker who shoulders the diabolical burden of a truth unbearably close to home.
