A young female FBI agent with unusually fine-tuned intuition comes aboard an active serial-killer case her superiors have been unable to crack, and proves to be the missing piece that helps move the investigation forward. It could be The Silence of the Lambs—or, if you flipped everything inside out and added an oversized dose of curated weirdness, it could be Longlegs.
The latest horror story from writer-director Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Gretel & Hansel; he’s also the son of Anthony Perkins, Psycho’s Norman Bates) furthers his fascination with intense female protagonists, dark fairy tales, and edgy stylistic touches that border on experimental. But Longlegs, which arrives after an esoteric marketing campaign that emphasizes its perplexing elements and its dread-laden tone, starts off feeling like what could be Perkins’ most accessible film to date. After a flashback prologue that offers what will absolutely go down as one of 2024’s most shriek-inducing character introductions, the narrative shifts to the film’s present—the Clinton-era 1990s—and we meet Longlegs’ main character: FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe).
She’s not a trainee, as Lambs’ Clarice Starling was, but she’s new to the field, working under perpetually gray skies somewhere in Oregon. She’s very serious, very focused, a bit stiff, and we soon see a visceral demonstration that Lee has crime-solving talents the bureau doesn’t fully understand but is happy to make use of. “Half-psychic is better than not psychic at all,” Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), her boss and mentor, tells her; he’s a jovial guy despite being deeply entangled in a case as baffling as it is disturbing. Soon, Lee’s taking point on the pursuit of a serial killer who’s been orchestrating murders of entire families for 30 years. That’s the disturbing part. The baffling part is that the crimes all appear to be murder-suicides committed by someone within the family. Outside involvement is only known because each crime is accompanied by a mysterious coded letter, signed “Longlegs.”
From here, Perkins could have taken Longlegs in a conventional direction. But as Lee begins to puzzle through the evidence, the movie begins to pivot into far less familiar territory. Monroe—so memorable as the college kid being chased in It Follows, and also a standout in The Guest and Watcher—does a remarkable job peeling back Lee’s layers; we first see her begin to relax as she’s driving home after a very long day, and the first time she smiles is when her mother (Alicia Witt), on the other end of an awkward phone call that plays like a routine Lee’s gone through a hundred times, asks her if the case she’s working on involves “nasty stuff.”
That it does, and it only gets nastier as the pursuit of Longlegs continues. Freaky details, as when Lee starts consulting A Guide to the Nine Circles of Hell as research material, further nudge the story in a supernatural direction, and just when you’re wondering exactly when we’ll get to meet this maniac—because we all know he’s played by Nicolas Cage—Longlegs comes through with one of the eccentric actor’s most eccentric performances of all time, not to mention most physically unrecognizable. That’s a motif of the movie; Witt is also hard to recognize, as is another famous face whose role we won’t spoil here. (Memes featuring Cage in character are absolutely guaranteed, so get ready to never escape those.)
“Longlegs is just a man, not a witch doctor,” Carter tells Lee when things start to get awfully woo-woo, but Lee’s not so sure, and neither are we. Some viewers might find Longlegs’ sudden third-act pile-up of Very Weird Shit too much to absorb, especially after all that carefully crafted and agonizingly effective build-up. A more by-the-numbers serial killer tale would take the time to connect more dots; even the very best of that genre, Lambs—which reverberates here in Lee’s heavy breathing when she has her gun drawn, or the hidden Polaroids that reveal an important clue—offered a certain amount of reasoning behind the evil coiled at its center. Longlegs is more content to rip out its own guts and leave the viewer breathless, wondering “Wait… what just happened?” as it mines terror from seemingly innocuous sources, like birthday parties, T. Rex lyrics, and wood-bodied station wagons. At a certain point you have to just let Perkins take the wheel with this one—and fans of idiosyncratic horror tales will absolutely enjoy the ride.
Longlegs opens in theaters July 12.
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