In this buzzy, punky pyschological horror, waves of terror build and break like a deranged storm, creating the cinematic sensory experience of walls of fear.

“Keep your mind in hell, and do not despair” – St. Silouan

This buzzy, punky horror of a film arrived with a lot of promise and delivers on a substantial amount of it. It’s Osgood Perkins’ fourth major film, and, while remaining largely in the same ballpark of genre, is a step-up in terms of reach and recognition. In part the result of a canny and creepy virality campaign, this energy is matched by the film’s modern, self-aware, and DIY aesthetic and spiky pacing. While knowingly leaning into conversation with horror classics, explicitly The Silence of the Lambs, it stands on its own two terrifying legs.  

At its core, Longlegs is an FBI procedural movie, but dresses this with devilish ambiguity and walks it straight through a nightmarish 70s home-video. It follows the fresh, awkward, anti-social – and “partly psychic” – FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she is assigned to the case of Longlegs (Nicolas Cage + serious prosthetics), an elusive an enigmatic figure connected to a number of family deaths. Longlegs – who looks like a kid’s party entertainer ordered from hell and interrupted mid-way through a Gene Simons face-paint tutorial – and his inscrutable esoteric mission haunt the film. Harker’s abilities, “Half-psychic is better than not psychic at all” notes her genial superior Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), are utilised to order and interpret Longlegs activity. However, her quick progress draws suspicion and drags her dangerously into the orbit of his plans. The film seeks out the trauma of growing up, and the things we can do, or forget, for the sake of ourselves and the ones we love. 

Uncanny ambivalence seeps slowly through the film like water through a sheet of paper, upending good and bad, known and unknown, safe and unsafe. The sharp directing and score create the kind of terror and anxiety that makes you acutely aware of all the nice normal things about the ordinary world that are left assumed and taken for granted. Out there, outside the cinema in the world where every window, doorway, dark night, and look, aren’t being masterfully used for suspense and fear.

No more so that the film’s gripping opening scene, extremely well-conceived and shot in a claustrophobic 4:3 ratio, it stifles and then drags you by the collar. A little girl is shown meeting Longlegs, anxiety spirals as we see him only from mouth down from the. We hear his disturbing voice, and it establishes the disconcerting fear he is able to hold over the film. The film never lets you go again, even as it reverts to a wider angle. This points to one of the movies strengths: its sparing use of Longlegs. This just off-screeness allows, in ways reminiscent of Jaws, the audience to project all kinds of anxieties and only intensifies our reptillian-brain ability to imagine the worst.

From there, waves of terror build and break like a deranged storm. The noise, anxiety, and action slow down and building up simultaneously, creating the sensory experience of walls of fear. Ambivalent and all too short respites then lead into the next wall, like some excitable electronic night, either you’re in the drop or anticipating the next. It’s brilliant and terrifying. Punk-rock meets the hardboiled detective fiction, as Lee Harker’s intangible awkward and eerie qualities jangle against Agent Carter’s overfriendly good cop, with the cookie cutter American family and American drawl.

The film is split up into three chapters and, despite a head-spinning film-flipping moment involving a shotgun, is let down by the third with its somewhat clunky exposition and ending. It is, admittedly, hard to end these kinds of film: do you lean into the occult or demystify it? However, the film surrendered to both impulses without squaring them off with each other.

The acting is all-round great. Maika Monroe absolutely nails the unsettling ‘something’s not right with this one’ energy that keeps you engaged all film. While Nicholas Cage, who has pretty much done it all, finds something new he can do. He’s clearly having fun with this one, which adds a Joker-like derangement to his weird and nightmarish Longlegs.

It may not quite live up to the carefully managed hype – it is not the scariest film ever, and it’s a homage not an equal to The Silence of the Lambs – but it succeeds on its own terms. For my own part, I thought of God’s advice to St. Silouan, this was 101 minutes where I kept my mind in hell.