Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage in Kill-Spree, a horror film

The unease lurking in a quiet Pacific Northwest town plagued by a string of murders is far behind the fears swirling in the protagonist's head. Long legsWriter-director Osgood Perkins' serial killer thriller fully acknowledges its debt to Thesilenceofthelambs In its chronicle of a young rookie agent drawn into the FBI's manhunt for a killer who is wiping out entire families, the film is also a strange journey, a dark and disturbing experience, imbued with an implacable evil in its subcutaneous creepiness.

Technically, I guess this could be considered a spoiler, so if you keep reading, don't complain. But the film allows Nicolas Cage to add another Hall of Fame entry to his gallery of psychopaths, one that won't be forgotten anytime soon. If you put Cage in genre material like this and then only hint at his presence in the trailers, it's obvious he's not going to be played in a warm and cuddly way. Long legs It's discovering that Cage's main character is only part of the horrific reality behind an escalating series of violent deaths.

The scale of this horror is revealed to be terrifyingly close to home for Agent Lee Harker, played by Maika Monroe, who first encountered Longlegs as a child 25 years earlier.

In this snappy prologue—set one day before young Lee's (Lauren Acala) ninth birthday and shown in a comfortable 4:3 aspect ratio with the rounded corners of an old home movie—Perkins adopts the Jaws The premise of the work is to give the audience only a partial and unsettling glimpse of the monster without being able to form a complete picture. What remains in our memory is the voice – a floating quasi-falsetto of indeterminate gender – as the stranger approaches Lee in the snowy park outside his isolated house.

The main action, set around 2000, opens with the adult Lee and his partner, Agent Fisk (Dakota Daulby), on their first day in the field. As they explore a suburban cul-de-sac for a house they believe is linked to the murders, Lee focuses on an attic window. She informs Fisk, in a tone of absolute certainty, that she has identified the house and that the killer is inside. Her partner brushes off her suggestion of calling for backup and approaches the door full of misplaced confidence.

An FBI psychological evaluation reveals that Harker has heightened intuitive abilities, prompting his boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), to make him a key member of the murder investigation team. Ten homes and ten different families have been hit, with husbands killing wives and children before committing suicide, using weapons that were already in the house. There is no sign of forced entry or foreign DNA, but at the scene of each crime, a note is left behind, written in code and signed “Longlegs.”

By studying case files and crime scene photos, Lee connects all the families to the girls whose birthdays fall on the 14th of each month. She keeps some of her findings to herself, not telling Carter about the figure she sees watching her from the woods outside her house, or the cryptic note she later finds on his desk that helps her crack the code.

Even before Lee’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) urges her daughter to keep saying prayers to protect her from harm, Perkins has begun to weave hints of religious horror into the film’s hallucinatory atmosphere. When the murders flash back to 1966, to a farming family whose sole survivor (Kiernan Shipka in a chilling extended cameo) is committed to a mental hospital, it turns out that the elusive Longlegs is a devil worshiper and dollmaker.

You don't need to have seen the Annabelle or Chucky movies or the deliciously kitsch M3GAN (What's up with this sequel?) It's worth noting that dolls in a horror movie are rarely harmless toys. Accepting one as a gift is foolish. But even with many of the key elements in place, the film keeps you guessing for a good while about how the murders are orchestrated and who else is involved.

There is also concern that Harker, whose heavily medicated mother suggests a family history of mental instability, may be susceptible to the subliminal influences that appear to be part of the killer's method.

It's a gripping film that keeps building its sense of nightmarish dread. Even though the identity of the family that will lead to a definitive resolution to the case is revealed far too early, the film continues to haunt you throughout.

Perkins' stroke of genius is to wait over 40 minutes before giving us full visual access to Cage's Longlegs, whose gaze is signaled by the lyrics to T. Rex's perverse hit “Get It On” appearing as on-screen text at the beginning: “Well, you're thin and you're weak / You've got the teeth of the hydra on you / You're dirty, sweet and you're my girl.”

Nearly unrecognizable beneath his heavy facial prosthetics, Cage resembles a cross between Marc Bolan and Tiny Tim, a decadent glam rocker with a straggly mop of silver hair, pale skin, and traces of eye makeup and lipstick. This look finds a sly echo in T. Rex's album cover photos. The cursor and Lou Reed's Transformer. Cage's strange, sing-song voice, often bordering on hysteria, is disconcerting enough, but his physical presence is something else entirely. His allusions to “My Friend Downstairs” will send shivers down your spine.

Perkins draws inspiration from the interviews between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in Thesilenceofthelambsand Lee's face-to-face confrontation with Longlegs doesn't disappoint. It also sets the stage for another direction in the murder investigation, one that heightens Lee's already sky-high anxiety levels.

Monroe's desperate attempts to escape evil in David Robert Mitchell's chilling cult film It follows Lee's words seem to have been good training for her character's ordeal. Unlike the ever-direct Carter or her fellow agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee), who considers Harker too rookie to be at the heart of the investigation, Lee is sullen and uncommunicative, her speech devoid of affect; she seems petrified by everything she discovers and at the same time somewhat enslaved to a malignant force and in denial of the lingering trauma of that enigmatic childhood encounter.

Underwood brings to Carter the seriousness but also the affability of a family man, which allows him to gain the trust of the wary Harker, while Witt takes his mother Ruth from a semi-absent and slightly out-of-touch situation to an irreparable one.

As much as the actors, what gives Long legs Its cursed power lies in the icy atmosphere of Andrés Arochi Tinajero’s cinematography, which often films through doors or windows that frame our view from insidious angles. Eugenio Battaglia’s dense sound design is another major asset, allowing viewers to jump from music or other aural cues rather than relying on the usual visual tricks. At 101 minutes long and divided into three chapters, the film is tense, making deft use of shifting aspect ratios between past and present and an eerie soundtrack.

Perkins has already taken sinister paths in his feature debut in 2015. The girl in the black coatin its more uneven monitoring, I am the pretty thing that lives in the houseand in his 2020 contribution to the subgenre of horribly reimagined fairy tales, Gretel and Hansel. One could argue that he mixes too many elements here – police procedural, occult mystery, mind control, satanic cult, creepy dolls, Faustian pact and a “nun” who is not fit for any convent. But Long legs is his most accomplished and effective film to date.