Longlegs film review: Nicolas Cage has created a truly frightening villain in his new film

The film legend has a long list of eccentric, confusing and twisted characters. He adds another classic to his resume in his new film, Longlegs.

Maika Monroe in Longlegs.

A palpable fear runs through Longlegs from the first frame until the last. It’s not the jump-scare tension of a slasher movie but something less tangible. You feel frightened without knowing exact­ly why.

The titular Longlegs appears in a pre-titles sequence that is shot so we see him only from the mouth down as he speaks to a girl who looks about 10.

“There she is, the almost birthday girl,’’ he says with a slight lisp. “Oh but it seems I wore my long legs today. What happens if I …”

He crouches to her height and we see him. It’s an almost unrecognisable Nicolas Cage, with long blond hair and an off-white three-piece suit that Karl Lagerfield might have designed on a bad day.

That’s all that happens – the titles appear and afterwards we move to an FBI briefing session – yet the unease with the seen but unknown, with the what if, takes hold and never lets go.

The writer-director is someone with that sort of anxious fear in his gene pool: American filmmaker Osgood Perkins, son of Anthony Perkins, the chilling Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho.

His previous horror films include I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016) and Gretel & Hansel (2020). In 1983 he played the young Norman Bates in Psycho II, with his dad returning in the main role.

The FBI briefing provides the plot set-up and the main character, rookie agent Lee Harker (a brilliantly edgy Maika Monroe).

It’s the 1990s – photos of President Bill Clinton adorn the FBI office walls – and the bureau is investigating the brutal killing of 10 families in the Oregon Coast region.

In each case – and the first happened in 1966 – who did the killing is clear: the husband and father. The murder weapon was a household item: shotgun, knife, hammer.

Each of the families had a daughter whose birthday fell on the 14th of the month. The cases remain unsolved because at each crime scene, amid the blood and gore, a coded letter was found, signed Longlegs.

Somehow, the FBI suspects, a serial killer orchestrated the killings.

Enter Agent Harker, who seems to know more about the putative killer than anyone else at the FBI.

“It’s like someone tapping me on the shoulder, telling me where to look,’’ she tells her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood).

A young female agent connecting with a serial killer has similarities to Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), but this film goes down a different path.

Agent Harker is single and lives alone. She’s in regular contact with her mother (Alicia Witt), who continually asks her daughter if she prays. And, we soon learn, Harker’s birthday falls on the 14th.

When Harker tells her boss her theory on the killings – that the killer has an accomplice – he replies, “That reads like a page out of [Charles] Manson.” Soon after he asks her, “What aren’t you telling me?”

That question will be in the mind of viewers too, especially when they see more of Longlegs. Cage is quietly – and sometimes loudly – manic as a man who resembles a clown escaped from hell. A persuasive clown perhaps. He speaks in riddles, he sings songs and yells out “Mummy!” and “Daddy!” as he drives a car. It’s a can’t-look, must-look performance.

The director does bring all of the threads together and answers most of the Who? Why? How? questions while leaving a few unanswered. That is his trademark style: the worst horror is the horror we don’t understand, or refuse to understand.