The masterfully unsettling Longlegs creeps through a rotten world

Horror is about upsetting our understanding of the world, which is why so many of the most famous horror movies of all time root themselves in the carefully arranged ordinary. Here’s a babysitter minding her own business until a masked man with a knife peers out from behind a hedge. Here’s an ordinary, happy family until their daughter disappears into the static of the TV screen. Here’s a garden variety nightmare invaded by a deadly dream demon. We understand these fears, at least in part, because the filmmakers behind them have told us, “Here’s the world as it should be,” and then introduced something that changes that. Then there are horror stories like Longlegs.

Directed with textured, precise control by Oz Perkins and led by the ice-and-fire lead performances of Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, Longlegs sets out from its opening frames not to root us in the ordinary, but to show us a world glazed over with malignance. Everything about it, from the performances to the production design to the sickly quality of the light in scene after scene, is designed to make us not just question what we’re seeing, but stand at a remove from it, like we’ve just seen a wild animal behaving strangely. Like that wild animal might just lash out and bite us if we get too close.

Nothing is as it should be in Longlegs, and maybe nothing ever was.

Monroe is Lee Harker, a young FBI Agent with an apparent sixth sense for trouble, one that attracts the eye of her supervisor, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood). Hoping she might be able to crack the case no one else has, Carter assigns Harker to the strange saga of the serial killer known only as Longlegs.

Seemingly operating for decades, Longlegs’ modus operandi is simple and terrifying, or at least that’s how it appears. He murders entire families in their homes and leaves behind strange notes in an alphabet of his own design. Or at least, that’s maybe what he does. Maybe he’s just the orchestrator and someone else murders the families, or maybe he drives the families to murder themselves. It’s not clear, and that’s what Lee has to figure out.

What Lee doesn’t know, of course, is that Longlegs (Cage, under strange and heavy makeup) is already very aware of her, and he’s got a plan for her involvement, whether she likes it or not.

It’s easy to see why this setup has drawn comparisons to Jonathan Demme’s classic The Silence Of The Lambs, but apart from the 1990s setting and the “female FBI Agent pursues serial killer” boilerplate, it’s a bit of a strange comparison, because from the beginning, Longlegs is after something else. This is not a tightly wound, procedural cat-and-mouse game with easily traceable clues and big investigative twists. There are clues, yes, and there are twists, but this is a film built less like a mystery and more like an atmospheric, malevolent rock song. It is, like so many of Perkins’ films, about feeling, and the writer-director marshals every force at work in the narrative to ensure that feeling never leaves us.

Front and center in all of this, of course, are Monroe and Cage, who are both doing some of their best work in a film that demands much of their respective gifts. Cage is no doubt the scene-stealer, imbuing Longlegs with the chaotic, quixotic energy of a kind of failed glam rock prophet, a guy who maybe wanted to be Marc Bolan (T. Rex’s music is a clear favorite for Perkins) and ended up a Satanic doomsayer instead. While it would be easy to shrug off his gestures and voice as Cage being Cage, there’s more control to this performance than you might initially suspect, a sense that Longlegs’ every move, every word, is an attempt to conjure something, to enact his concentrated will on the world. And because it’s Cage bringing all of his power to that conjuration, you get the sense that he’s everywhere at once, that the world is just waiting to spit him out at any moment so he can, with his quivering voice, put a spell on you.

Then there’s Monroe, who plays Harker as a coiled spring, her jaw perpetually frozen in place as if at any moment she could either scream or burst into tears. She is someone who has never felt at ease in this world, and as the film goes on, we understand that it’s because she sees the fabric of carefully constructed reality fraying at the edges, threatening to unravel. Her heart knows things that her mind is unwilling to admit, and the slow admission of this knowledge through her eyes is one of Monroe’s great triumphs as an actor.

But even with these titanic performances at the fore of the story, the real star of Longlegs is Perkins, horror auteur. He’s always been a master of atmosphere, but even by that standard he’s outdone himself here. Longlegs is immersed in sickly light, from the low halogen glow of lamps in wood-paneled rooms to the tallowy paleness of snow-covered lawns and the dreadful, overcast grays of cookie-cutter neighborhoods. It’s not an underlit movie, but there’s a sense in every scene that the characters can never see well enough, like the world morphs around them to make it harder to glimpse the truth of the horrors they’re investigating. The sound design, too, reinforces this sense that the world is Longlegs’ hiding place, that malevolence and rot and concentrated evil are creaking just out of frame, behind every door and around every corner. Those corners are explored through an often motionless camera which sits at just the right angle to make us think the characters are never truly alone, and the more the film pushes its tension, the more you’re searching those angles for dark figures and unlikely shapes.

It all serves to create a world where nothing is ever settled, no one is ever safe, and no answers ever come easy or completely. From the first seconds to the last, Longlegs will have you squirming, a triumph of tension and tone and pure nightmare fuel. It is one of the year’s best horror films, and a confirmation that Oz Perkins is one of the best in the genre.