The unease lurking in a quiet Pacific Northwest city affected by a collection of murders is a distant second to the fears churning contained in the protagonist’s head in Longlegs. Author-director Osgood Perkins’ serial killer chiller absolutely acknowledges a debt to The Silence of the Lambs in its chronicle of a younger feminine rookie agent pulled into the FBI manhunt for a killer wiping out whole households. However the film can be its personal freaky journey, a darkly disturbing expertise pulsing with an evil that’s unrelenting in its subcutaneous creepiness.

Technically, I assume this may very well be thought of a spoiler, so if you happen to proceed studying, don’t complain. However the movie permits Nicolas Cage so as to add one other Corridor of Fame entry to his gallery of psychos, one which gained’t quickly be forgotten. If you happen to forged Cage in style materials like this after which solely trace at his presence within the trailers, it’s a provided that he’s not going to be enjoying heat and cuddly. The enjoyable in Longlegs is in discovering that Cage’s title character is only one a part of the horrific actuality behind a rising string of violent deaths.

The complete extent of that horror is revealed to be alarmingly near house for Maika Monroe‘s Agent Lee Harker, who first encountered Longlegs when she was a baby, 25 years earlier.

In that attention-grabbing prologue — unfolding a day earlier than the ninth birthday of the younger Lee (Lauren Acala) and proven in comfortable 4:3 facet ratio with the rounded corners of an outdated house film — Perkins adopts the Jaws precept of giving the viewers solely an unsettling partial glimpse of the monster with out having the ability to kind a full image. What does stick with us is the voice — a fluttery quasi-falsetto of indeterminate gender — because the stranger approaches Lee within the snowy grounds outdoors her remoted house.

The principle motion, set round 2000, opens with the grownup Lee and her companion Agent Fisk (Dakota Daulby) on their first day trip within the subject. As they case a suburban cul-de-sac on the lookout for a home they consider is linked to the murders, Lee focuses on an attic window. She informs Fisk, with a tone of absolute certainty, that she has recognized the home and that the killer is inside. Her companion brushes off her suggestion of calling for backup, approaching the door filled with misplaced confidence.

A Bureau psych analysis finds Harker to have heightened intuitive skills, prompting her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), to make her a key member of the investigative crew on the murders. Ten homes and ten completely different households have been hit, with husbands killing wives and youngsters earlier than taking their very own lives, utilizing weapons that have been already in the home. There are not any indicators of compelled entry or outsider DNA however on the scene of every crime, a word is left behind, written in code and signed “Longlegs.”

As Lee pores over case information and graphic crime-scene pictures, she makes the connection that each one the households had daughters whose birthdays fell on the 14th of any given month. She retains a few of her findings to herself, not mentioning to Carter the determine she sees watching her from the woods outdoors her home, or the cryptic word she later finds on her desk, which helps her crack the code.

Even earlier than Lee’s mom, Ruth (Alicia Witt), urges her daughter to maintain saying her prayers to guard her from evil, Perkins has begun insinuating hints of spiritual horror into the movie’s hallucinatory temper. When the killings are traced again to a farm household in 1966, whose sole survivor (Kiernan Shipka in a chilling prolonged cameo) is in a psychiatric establishment, it emerges that the elusive Longlegs is a satan worshipper and a dollmaker.

You don’t have to have seen the Annabelle or Chucky films or the deliciously campy M3GAN (what’s occurring with that sequel?) to know that dolls in a horror film are seldom benign playthings. Accepting one as a present is foolishness. However even with most of the key parts in place, the film retains you guessing for a great lengthy whereas about how the murders are being orchestrated and who else is concerned.

There’s additionally the concern that Harker, whose closely medicated mom suggests a household historical past of psychological instability, could be vulnerable to the subliminal influences that look like a part of the killer’s technique.

That is gripping stuff that steadily cranks up its nightmarish feeling of dread. Even when the identification of the household that can result in a conclusive break within the case is telegraphed approach too early, the film continues to work its approach beneath your pores and skin for the period.

Perkins’ stroke of genius is ready greater than 40 minutes earlier than giving us full visible entry to Cage’s Longlegs, whose look is signaled by the lyrics from the pervy T. Rex banger “Get It On” that seem as textual content on the display in the beginning: “Nicely you’re slim and also you’re weak / You’ve received the enamel of the hydra upon you / You’re soiled, candy and also you’re my lady.”

Just about unrecognizable beneath heavy facial prosthetics, Cage is sort of a cross between Marc Bolan and Tiny Tim, a gone-to-seed glam rock casualty with a mop of straggly silver hair, pasty pores and skin and smeared traces of eye make-up and lipstick. That facet finds sly echoes in album-cover photographs of T. Rex’s The Slider and Lou Reed’s Transformer. The bizarre sing-song voice Cage adopts, usually on the point of hysteria, is unnerving sufficient, however his bodily presence is one thing else solely. His mentions of “My buddy downstairs” will ship shivers down your backbone.

Perkins takes his cue from the interviews between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, and the face-to-face confrontation of Lee with Longlegs doesn’t disappoint. It additionally opens a path for the homicide investigation to veer in one other course, one which heightens Lee’s already off-the-charts anxiousness ranges.

Monroe’s determined makes an attempt to outrun evil in David Robert Mitchell’s creepy cult hit It Follows appear to have been good coaching for her character’s ordeal right here. Not like the all the time direct Carter or fellow agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee), who considers Harker too inexperienced to be so central to the investigation, Lee is brooding and uncommunicative, her supply affectless; she appears petrified by all that she uncovers and on the similar time considerably in thrall to a malignant power and in denial concerning the lingering trauma of that enigmatic childhood encounter.

Underwood brings gravitas but additionally family-man affability to Carter, permitting him to achieve the belief of cautious Harker, whereas Witt takes her mom Ruth from semi-absent and mildly off-kilter to messed-up past restore.

As a lot because the actors, what provides Longlegs its cursed energy is the shivery ambiance of Andrés Arochi Tinajero’s cinematography, usually capturing by way of doorways or home windows that body our view from insidious angles. Eugenio Battaglia’s dense sound design is one other massive plus, dialing up leap scares derived from music or different sonic cues slightly than leaning on the same old visible methods. At 101 minutes divided into three chapters, the film is tautly paced, making deft use of the shifting facet ratios between previous and current and of an eerie rating.  

Perkins has traveled down sinister roads earlier than, in his 2015 function debut The Blackcoat’s Daughter, in his extra uneven follow-up, I Am the Fairly Factor That Lives within the Home, and in his 2020 contribution to the subgenre of gruesomely reimagined fairy tales, Gretel & Hansel. It could be argued that he stirs too many parts into the combo right here — crime procedural, occult thriller, thoughts manipulation, Satanic worship, scary dolls, a Faustian discount and a “nun” not match for any convent. However Longlegs is his most absolutely realized and relentlessly efficient movie up to now.