101 min | R | July 12, 2024 | Neon
Osgood Perkins makes a serial killer film that feels like a nightmare you cannot wake from. Nicolas Cage disappears into prosthetics and madness. Maika Monroe anchors the dread.
FBI Agent Lee Harker is assigned to an unsolved case spanning decades. Families are being murdered in what appear to be murder-suicides, but the evidence suggests an outside force. A figure known as Longlegs is connected to every case. Harker has an intuitive gift that her superiors exploit and she does not fully understand. The film unfolds as a procedural that slowly reveals itself as something occult and deeply personal. Osgood Perkins builds a world where dread is the atmosphere and the air never clears.
Maika Monroe plays Harker with a stillness that borders on catatonic. She is a woman who has spent her life dampening herself. The performance is brave in its refusal to be likable or expressive. Monroe communicates terror through the smallest shifts in her face. Nicolas Cage plays Longlegs with a performance that is genuinely unrecognizable. The prosthetics transform him. The voice is high and sing-song and wrong in every way. He is in the film less than you expect and every second he appears is unbearable. Blair Underwood plays Agent Carter with steady authority. Alicia Witt plays Harker’s mother with a guilt that the film slowly explains.
Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins and he has inherited an understanding of how horror lives in quiet spaces. The film is shot in muted tones with natural light that makes every room feel diseased. The sound design is oppressive. Silence is used as a weapon. The marketing campaign for this film was brilliant in withholding Cage’s appearance and the film itself follows the same principle of restraint. What you do not see is worse than what you do.
The film’s final act will divide audiences. The occult elements either deepen the horror or undermine the procedural depending on your tolerance for the supernatural. Perkins commits fully to his vision and does not compromise for accessibility. The result is a horror film that earns its comparisons to Silence of the Lambs and Seven while being entirely its own thing. Neon’s marketing made this an event. The film justifies the event.