If you’ve heard anything about Longlegs, it’s that it’s scary as hell. The indie distributor Neon, which in March had a modest hit with the Rosemary’s Baby riff Immaculate, has been building anticipation for Oz Perkins’ fourth feature since the beginning of the year, with an enigmatic publicity campaign that felt at times like being on the trail of a real-life serial killer. Even as anticipation built, the ads continued to hide the ball, claiming in one teaser that actress Maika Monroe’s heart rate spiked to 170 bpm the first time she saw Nicolas Cage made up as the movie’s titular serial killer, then cutting to a shot of Cage with his face obscured by a large black box.
This is all great for building suspense and getting audiences into theaters, but it also sets up some false expectations, which may be why several people walked out of my screening on Thursday night. Although Longlegs has the feel of a horror movie, with a tense, droning score and shots that linger on the empty space over a character’s shoulder, it’s not really designed to instill fear, and it’s especially not designed to release it. (Yet another enigma: The movie’s score is credited to Zilgi, which may be a pseudonym for an as-yet-unidentified composer or just for writer-director Osgood Perkins himself.) As someone who regularly finds myself itching for the pause button when horror movies get too intense—one reason I prefer watching them in theaters is because it removes that temptation—I sometimes have to remind myself that the best way to dissipate that sense of anxiety is simply to keep watching until the end. Evil either is vanquished or, less often, triumphs, but regardless, the monsters leave their hiding places and the constant anxiety about what might happen next is resolved.
Longlegs has a mystery at its core, namely how it is that Cage’s character has induced a string of fathers to murder their families and themselves—a killing spree all the more impressive because there’s no evidence he laid a finger on any of his victims or even entered their homes. But Monroe’s Lee Harker, a novice FBI agent who is just taking on her first cases, doesn’t need much time to figure out Longlegs’ pattern or to decode the cipher in which he’s been leaving cryptic letters at the crime scenes for decades. Lee, though, can’t entirely explain how she has cracked the case, because she’s not only a dedicated investigator: She’s also psychic.
There’s some quibbling between Lee and her new boss at the Bureau, Carter (Blair Underwood), about whether she actually has inexplicable abilities or is merely “highly intuitive.” (In a test that resembles The Parallax View’s slideshow indoctrination, she correctly guesses a random number eight times—and misses it eight times.) But either way, she feels as if she comprehends things she can’t and shouldn’t. It’s as if an unseen figure has tapped her on the shoulder, she explains, and she just knows where to look.
In other words, Longlegs is less about the fear of the unknown than about the dread of the known, the sickening lurch toward the inevitable. Although Perkins—the son of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins—introduces Cage-as-Longlegs with a child’s-eye-view shot that shows him solely from the neck down, it’s only a minute or two before he ducks into frame, even if the camera cuts away almost as soon as he does. And by the time we do get a good look at him, all I could think is that he looks like a cross between Heath Ledger’s Joker and Miss Piggy, not exactly an unholy visage to send one’s heart racing. Untold numbers of movies have fizzled in their third acts because a revealed evil is less terrifying than an imagined one, but Longlegs doesn’t stretch out the revelation so long that it becomes an inevitable letdown. We can see what’s coming, and that only makes it worse.
This particularly grinding form of dread also drives In a Violent Nature, the cult horror hit that recounts a Friday the 13th–style slasher story from the perspective of the masked killer himself, and Speak No Evil, the bloody-minded Danish thriller whose American remake was advertised before my screening of Longlegs. They’re movies that evoke death and doom with a kind of numbed-out regularity, a sense that the worst is already foreordained. In Longlegs, the killer is fond of dropping allusions to Revelation, framing human existence as a book whose last page we can flip to and see how it ends. The movie is part procedural thriller, a riff on The Silence of the Lambs that sets its heroine on a course to stop a killer before he claims more victims. But unlike Jodie Foster’s wide-open gaze, Monroe’s is set and stony, as if she has already seen too much before she lays eyes on her first homicide scene. She’s not surprised by the terrible things she observes, and neither are we, who’ve watched these kinds of movie horrors before and live in a world populated by worse ones. All we can do is brace ourselves. We know what we’re headed for. We just don’t know how to stop it.
