A young F.B.I. agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), and her partner go house-to-house door knocking. They are looking for someone. Someone dangerous. As soon as she gets out of the car she stares at one particular house. She knows it is the one. The killer is there.
She tells her partner. She suggests calling for backup. He scoffs. How could she know? She’s right. The killer is there. She has some light clairvoyance.
Right from the start Osgood Perkins lets us know this film is going to be a police procedural, and one that believes in the supernatural. It also lets us in on the fact that Nicolas Cage is gonna give one of his strongest performances.
In a brief flashback, the film opens with a little girl hearing a noise out on her isolated farmhouse. A man (Cage is some wild prosthetics and makeup) appears seemingly out of nowhere. Cage affects a high-pitched voice and behaves erratically. It is a bizarre, yet effective performance. More on that in a minute.
Harker is recruited by Agent William Carter (Blaire Underwood) to join his task force investigating a series of murder-suicides. In each case, the father kills his wife and children before offing himself. Each time a note is left behind with some strange symbols, written in an unknown person’s handwriting, and it is signed “Longlegs.”
Harker has an innate ability to decipher the symbols and follow clues that will lead her and Carter to Longlegs. But he seems to have a connection to her, too. He visits her house and leaves her a note.
I won’t spoil what happens next except to say I wasn’t always with it in terms of story and plot. I found the last twenty minutes to be a bit much. But the film creates a vibe that I really dug. It is full of dread and menace.
It is a film that makes you look in the background just to see what might be sneaking up on you. There is one scene where something happens in the back of the screen that I had to rewind just to see how they did it.
And that Cage performance is one for the books. He’s an actor that can often go way over the top and this is crazy even for him. I’m not sure I actually loved it but I admire it just the same.
Actually, the entire film is a bit like that. I did not love it, but I dig that this type of film is still being made. Filmmakers are willing to take risks and do something a little different.
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