Longlegs is the horror event of the summer—a serial killer thriller that plays like a nightmarish swirl of The Silence of the Lambs , Seven , Psycho and Zodiac , albeit with far less rationality and considerably more demonic derangement. Featuring a maniacal performance from an unrecognizable Nicolas Cage as a fiend who preys upon young girls, it’s the kind of movie that lingers long after the credits have rolled, its shocking images burned into the brain. A genre film whose superficial conventionality masks underlying insanity, it’s a saga of mothers, children, intuition, and dark idolatry that unnerves by providing few comforting answers to its bizarre secrets.
Part procedural, part fairy tale, Longlegs is a uniquely demented affair, if also the recognizable work of Osgood Perkins , who infuses it with the same off-kilter menace and dreamy deviance that he brought to his prior The Blackcoat’s Daughter , I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House , and Hansel & Gretel . Neon The son of Psycho icon Anthony Perkins, the writer/director has, over the past decade, established himself as one of horror’s most idiosyncratic and assured voices thanks to films about alienated and sorrowful women struggling to maintain control (of themselves, and their lives) in the face of ghastly threats. That focus continues with his latest, which follows Maika Monroe ’s FBI special agent Lee Harker as she endeavors to solve a series of grisly homicides committed over 30 years by an .
