In recent years, Nicolas Cage has often been more of a meme than an actor, thanks to the star’s reliable over-the-top performances. After appearing more tragic and vulnerable than he has in a long time in Dream Scenario, the disturbing crowning achievement of his career. He plays a psychopath you won’t be prepared for in the serial killer horror film Longlegs. And the rest of the film, directed by Oz Perkins (The Devil’s Daughter), is great too.
In Longlegs, a serial killer hunt becomes an oppressive hell trip
In the film’s story, It Follows star Maika Monroe plays FBI agent Lee Harker, who seems to have slight supernatural abilities. At crime scenes, she makes connections faster than anyone else and a strange intuition seems to tell her directly where the wanted persons are. Nevertheless, she reaches her limits in the current investigation, in which a serial killer has been killing selected families for 30 yearswithout being there yourself.
Directly after the spectacularly disturbing opening sequence, Oz Perkins jumps into the film present of the 1990s in Longlegs. With calm, almost faded-looking images, we immerse ourselves in a world that, probably not coincidentally, takes place during the heyday of iconic serial killer films such as Seven and The Silence of the Lambs.
Watch another Longlegs trailer here:
Longlegs – Trailer (English) HD
At the beginning, Perkins’ work quickly joins the ranks of these films with the introduction of the murder investigation. The director introduces Monroe’s main character as a visibly burdened, almost neurodiverse FBI agent who personal demons seems to bring into the case.
Longlegs unfolds its intangible horror, which could be lurking behind every frame of the oppressively composed shots, in an extremely dark and mysterious way. However, the film does not simply emulate famous representatives of the genre, but builds a very own, original mythology from sometimes bizarre details such as occult symbols.
The fear of organized serial killer cults like the Manson Family is addressed just as explicitly in longlegs as religious fanaticism, which explodes in the almost unbearably tense finale. And then there’s Nicolas Cage as the titular psycho killer.
Nicolas Cage delivers an unforgettable acting performance in the horror highlight Longlegs
The clever marketing for the horror film hid Cage almost completely, and in the film it takes a long time before he is even seen in all his “glory”. Again and again we only see sections of his figure, fragments of his face, or just hear his voice, which fluctuates between naive childishness and pure Cage rage.
DCM
Longlegs
We don’t want to give away too much about his character at this point, because Longlegs presents the star in a more fascinating way than he has in a long time. Two or three instantly legendary Cage moments Perkins also unleashes this in his film, but he does not rob the serial killer of his disturbing terror.
Longlegs first appears as the darkest phantom from a repressed part of Lee Harker’s subconscious. When the two characters finally meet, the film turns the mysterious serial killer hunt into an even larger puzzle of gruesome pieces that Perkins pushes together with almost perverse glee.
In the end, after bloody shocks, rarely used jump scares and a permanent A threatening backdrop of satanic panic, supernatural terror and real horrorone thing remains certain: nobody ends up in hell after death. We have been there for a long time.
