Longlegs review – a harrowing serial killer thriller

One of the most horrifying, heart-in-mouth moments in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs comes when Clarice Starling is trapped in a pitch-black room with Buffalo Bill. We watch a terrified Starling through the green and white glow of his night vision goggles as she scrambles desperately through the darkness, as the killer slowly reaches towards her. It’s a classic ​“He’s behind you!” moment that owes much to the horror staples that preceded it, but when Demme kills the score and positions us as the killer, the sound of Starling’s panicked breathing ringing in our ears, it creates a brand new sort of terror. The moment lasts just under two minutes but feels like it goes on forever.

Creating this sense of dread isn’t easy faced with audiences who have seen it all, and Demme’s film has influenced countless psychological thrillers since, including Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, which also focuses on a young female FBI agent on the trail of a psycho killer with an alliterative monicker. In fact, it’s set in 1993 – just one year after The Silence of the Lambs was released. But unlike Clarice Starling, Lee Harker (deadpan and fragile but steely-nerved, played by It Follows Scream Queen Maika Monroe) seems to possess a latent psychic ability – one that serves to alienate her from her peers at the bureau, still very much a boy’s club having only started accepting female agents some 20 years earlier. But her superior Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), a gruff but kind paternal figure, recognises Harker’s talent as well as her solitariness and attempts to take her under his wing as they track a mysterious serial killer leaving cryptic coded notes signed ​‘Longlegs’.

This is where Nicolas Cage comes in, sporting a stringy blonde wig and cakey white make-up, speaking in high-pitched riddles. What should be cartoonish is effectively disturbing, his air of clownery juxtaposed by the awfulness of the ritual killings and the austere coolness of Andrés Arochi’s cinematography. Perkins pays tribute to the relationship between Starling and her adversary Hannibal Lecter, though Longlegs is no serene mastermind – Cage’s performance has more in common with Tom Noonan in Manhunter than Brian Cox or Anthony Hopkins. Longlegs is merely a servant of something even more malevolent that has been stalking Harker her whole life.

While there are elements of the supernatural at play, the feeling of dread that permeates the dark, snowy setting is all too human. Alicia Witt’s supporting turn as Harker’s disturbed, distant mother is bone-chilling, while Kiernan Shipka – who starred in Perkins’ debut The Blackcoat’s Daughter – delivers a remarkable performance as Longlegs’ only known survivor, residing in a psychiatric facility. There are many hallmarks of the psychological horror at play (a creepy killer, a traumatised survivor, a parent with dark secrets) but under Perkins’ careful hand, the familiar feels unnerving all the same, a puzzle box dripping with bright red blood.

Forgoing easy-win jump scares in favour of a sickening undercurrent of fear, Longlegs’ originality and boldness feel refreshing in an age of horror franchises, spin-offs and sequels – this is shlocky strangeness that throws back to the video nasties of the 70s with a grungy makeover that imbues the film with melancholy. It’s become a recurring joke that modern horror films are all about trauma, but Perkins’ wise choice to root Longlegs in specific horrifying truths – that a parent can be both loving and atrocious at the same time, and there is some evil in the world beyond explanation – means it sidesteps the generic, metamorphosing into the most unsettling psychological horror of recent memory. Complimented by Monroe’s restraint and Cage’s pleasingly harrowing performance, it’s a film that begs to be rewatched and dissected…if you’ve got the stomach for it.