A haunting he will go: Nicolas Cage is at his creepiest in ‘Longlegs’

Osgood Perkins’ serial-killer saga is a nod to ’90s classics, with standout performances by Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage.

By James Verniere/Boston Movie News

Nicolas Cage delivers the creepiest performance of his career in the flawed but noteworthy serial killer thriller “Longlegs.” However, he does it (spoiler alert) behind a mask of Lon Chaney-inspired prosthetics, rendering him unrecognizable. But the film’s best performance is by the story’s lead actor, Maika Monroe (“It Follows”), as the deeply troubled Oregon FBI Agent Lee Harker. She is an even more traumatized Clarice Starling. Lee has not just heard the screams of the lambs. She’s met Longlegs. Written and directed by Osgood Perkins (“I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House”), the son of Anthony Perkins, aka Norman Bates of “Psycho” (1960), and photographer Berry Berenson, “Longlegs” takes its lead from the 1991 Jonathan Demme landmark “The Silence of the Lambs” with Academy Award-winning turns by Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, as well as bits from David Fincher’s “Se7en” (1995). Like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Se7en,” “Longlegs” is set in the 1990s and tells the story of a group of FB agents on the trail of a serial killer.

“Half psychic” Agent Harker (Monroe) is sent out on a case to canvas with a partner, who is shot dead, leaving Harker to search for the shooter alone in an unfamiliar house (this is almost a redo of the final confrontation with Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs”). The plot will also involve Lee’s relationship with a paternal, older superior named Agent Carter (a best-ever Blair Underwood), who is happily married and has a young daughter and an office with a portrait of Bill Clinton mounted on his wall.

The film opens with a flashback to Lee’s childhood when she and her religious single mother (Alicia Witt) encounter the strange, pale, probably insane man Longlegs (Cage) in her front yard. Thirty years later, Harker is assigned to the case of a serial killer who is somehow murdering entire families without stepping inside their houses. Along with other evidence are coded letters written using some arcane script, a single, surviving victim named Carrie Anne (Kiernan Shipka) living in a nearby psych hospital, and a small automaton buried beneath the floor of an old attic of a murdered family.

Featuring music reportedly by a pseudonymous Elvis Perkins of Perkins’ previous features, “Longlegs” is spooky sounding (courtesy of designer Eugenio Battaglia) and spooky looking. Monroe’s notably dark-haired Harker doesn’t smile until about half an hour into the film, and it’s a shock. Cinematographer Andres Arochi mixes straightforward imagery with expressive, dream-like visuals. Flashlights barely penetrate the dense darkness. Osgood gives his characters evocative names such as Carter, Harker, Camera, and—scariest of all—Cobble, aka Longlegs. Cage’s killer speaks unusually breathy and high-pitched, resembling DC’s madman Joker more than a little.

Like the seamstress Buffalo Bill, Longlegs is more than a killer. He is a master life-sized doll-maker. Carrie Anne, who has not spoken in years, suddenly turns into —dare I say it?—Chatty Cathy. In a brilliant touch, a girl working in her father’s hardware store (another Perkins named Beatrix) deflates Longlegs’ terror quotient by calling out, “Dad, that gross guy is here, again?”

When Harker meets Carter’s daughter, the little girl invites her to her upcoming birthday party (You’d better hope it’s not on the 14th). “Longlegs” creeps you out and gets under your skin. But it begins to unravel in its third act when it asks you to accept the idea that insufficiently summoned supernatural forces are at play. Longlegs’ belated screech, “Hail, Satan,” is too little, too late. But “Longlegs,” Cage, Monroe, and Perkins already had me spooked. Cue T. Rex and “the teeth of the hydra.”

‘Longlegs’

Rating: R for bloody violence, disturbing images, and some language.

Cast: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt

Director/Writer: Osgood Perkins

Running time: 101 minutes

Where to Watch: In theaters July 12

Grade: B+