Random Thoughts on Longlegs and Nicolas Cage

The much-hyped indie horror brings the king of cinematic idiosyncrasies to the forefront.

FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is working on a routine door-to-door check with a colleague when she suddenly feels drawn to a house. The killer is in there. Her colleague is skeptical but goes to check, then dies. Her curious abilities make her an ideal fit for an ongoing investigation, a decades-long serial killer case wherein various families are brutally murdered and cryptic notes are left behind by a figure known only as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage.)

Indie distributor Neon has done an enviable job of hyping up Longlegs as not only the must-see horror film of 2024 but perhaps one of the scariest films of our time. Their marketing campaign, complete with achingly detailed retro websites and Zodiac-esque messages in the comments of various Letterboxd accounts, harkens back to the era of William Castle offering life insurance policies to movie-goers in case they died of fright. It certainly put me on edge when I went to see the film. As both a horror lover and a certified chicken, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t watch chunks of Longlegs with my hand hovering halfway across my eyes. It is certainly an unnerving piece of work that showcases the skills of director Osgood Perkins to great effect, but a wobbly third act means it can’t quite stick the landing. It’s almost fitting that Norman Bates’ kid made a movie that suffers from “Last Five Minutes of Psycho” Syndrome.

My Pajiba colleague Lindsay Travers noted in her review that Perkins shines brightest when he's allowed to play around in the abstract, and that Longlegs, perhaps driven by pressure to be a more palatable mainstream piece of work, "caves to the temptation to wrap its story in a bow." The prior two acts are incredibly good at showing Agent Harker's work with this case, which feels like she's picking at a scab until she reaches the bone. The dense, dark cinematography has you glancing at every corner just in case you see something move, and the sound design is almost industrial in how it distorts basic things like a phone call on a bad line. The influences of the likes of The Silence of the Lambs and David Fincher's Zodiac are evident, and not just because this is a period piece (I did laugh when I saw the Bill Clinton portrait in one FBI agent's office.) Longlegs shines as an investigative thriller with intrusions of the stomach-roiling supernatural.

I’ll get to the Nic Cage of it all in a second but the performance of the film is undoubtedly Maika Monroe. A breakout scream queen thanks to It Follows, she balances Harker’s determination with her social awkwardness, forever weighed down by abilities she doesn’t understand and a job she knows will eventually destroy her. She’s Clarice Starling if she were overwhelmed with fear all the dang time.

Of course, it’s a Cage film (he’s also a producer), and since he’s the killer (this isn’t a spoiler, the marketing focuses heavily on this detail), he’s getting a lot of attention. Smothered in prosthetics that leaving him with an immovable face and doing a Tiny Tim-esque tic-laden voice, this is certainly not a restrained performance. Longlegs is wrong in every way and everyone who comes into contact with him knows it. He’s meant to represent a kind of indomitable evil that exists around every corner, making everything it comes into contact with irrevocably toxic. You’re meant to be grossed out by him. And believe me, I was. I did not like looking at this dude in his White Chicks-esque makeup. But it also ended up feeling like a misstep both on Cage and Perkins’ part. I wonder if this character would have been more effective had he been played by a guy who just looked like everyone else and who didn’t come with the baggage of being Nicolas Cage.

Several years ago, I went to see Mandy in the cinema. Panos Cosmatos’ trippy revenge thriller was seen as a key part of Cage’s post-2015 renaissance, a change for the oft-maligned actor who had spent years making interchangeable action shlock. I love Mandy, and I think it's one of Cage's best performances. He's quiet, introverted, a traumatized man whose peaceful life with his love is ruined by evil hippies. It drives him mad and it's hard to watch him lose his sense of self. But the audience I saw it with wanted Cage Rage. They wanted the memes, and they kept trying to force laughs out of moments that were clearly intended to be emotional. A similar thing happened when I saw Pig, another brilliant late-era Cage drama where he is as restrained as he's ever been. It put a damper on both screenings, I must say.

Nicolas Cage has spent a long time trying to prove that everyone is wrong and he’s right. He arrived in Hollywood fully formed, a Coppola by birth who rejected realism in favour of what he would later characterize as Western Kabuki and Nouveau Shamanic. It's easy to mock, especially in films where Cage seems to be applying his style to material it's not a natural fit for. It inspired a lot of memes. It also gave this overwhelming impression to the world that Cage was a bad actor. He's not. Nowadays, the world has come around to his intentionality. David Lynch said he was to acting what jazz was to music. Ethan Hawke said he was "the only actor since Marlon Brando that's actually done anything new with the art of acting." Even though he was an Oscar winner, it felt almost controversial to declare Cage as a man who was good at his job. By the 2010s, you could find plenty of articles describing him as underrated. Honestly, I think he still kind of is, in an institutional manner.

Perhaps that's why Osgood Perkins let Cage off the leash rather than rein him in. He trusted him enough to not tell him when to say no. But there’s the mistake that often happens with “Great Actors” who reach a certain level of power. They either stop listening to the director or the filmmaker is too enamoured with their legend to intervene. Longlegs needed Mandy Cage, not Wild at Heart Nic.

Thanks for reading. There will be a new issue of the Gossip Reading Club available this coming Sunday.

The iconic Shelley Duvall passed away this week. To commemorate her, I wrote about her work on Faerie Tale Theatre for TheWrap.