Longlegs (2024)

After demonstrating what may or may not be some ESP abilities, young FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is drafted into the hunt for a peculiar serial killer. The killer, let’s call him Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), doesn’t actually appear to lay hands on his victims, but somehow gets them to kill each other, following his own ritualistic specifics.

There may or may not be black magic or Satanism involved; in any case, Lee is going to find herself drawn into proceedings rather more personally than a member of any police force would hope to.

If anyone expected me to be part of the backlash against Oz Perkins’s newest film, a rather wonderful example of weird and highly individual genre cinema also making a surprising amount of money and pleasing many a critic, they probably don’t know me. This thing was made with someone with my tastes as its ideal audience, and I’m certainly not going to pretend otherwise.

While this was certainly very consciously schooled on the aesthetics of Silence of the Lamb and what follows (though Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s wonderful Cure is probably more important here), Longlegs makes clear very early on that it isn’t trying to be even a dramatized “realistic” police procedural or serial killer thriller. It is rather a film that uses elements and tropes of these genres to lure an audience into something stranger and a little more subversive, a world and a headspace built on the kind of nightmare logic that nearly appears to make sense but tends to shift and get blurry around its edges in the moments when you’re not exactly thinking or looking.

Which, really, is pretty much what I expect of Perkins by now. Particularly the way in which the film’s metaphors are well-built to suggest certain interpretations (here about alienation and family), and the plot could nearly neatly resolve but then doesn’t quite is very much in keeping with the director’s modus operandi in his earlier films. This isn’t Perkins being unable to make a movie that is soluble like a crossword puzzle, but him aggressively rejecting the kind of naively rationalist world view that can still believe in such a thing as an expression of reality. Instead of neat resolutions and explanations, this is a film about slowly building dread, the horrors of facing one’s nightmares and still not ending them, and those very bad moments in the middle of the night when you can’t quite discern if there’s a difference between nightmare and waking life.

Needless to say, there are certain, sometimes innocuous, shots in here that I still can’t shake days after having seen the film.

That Longlegs manages to hold up this mood for the whole of its runtime is a little, dark, wonder; that it does so while also offering a perfect, naturalistic performance by Monroe at its core is particularly clever; and that rather a lot of viewers can’t or won’t go where Perkins leads with this one, I won’t blame them for.

I, on the other hand, cannot imagine watching another film this year that’s quite so much me and for me.