Nicolas Cage Is Tiny Tim as a Serial Killer in Longegs. That's Somehow Terrifying Rather Than Ridiculous

Cage's comeback continues!

I’m still not entirely sure why, but for a period of years, I went to the movies infrequently. Nicolas Cage’s movies similarly skipped the theaters in favor of a down-and-dirty direct-to-streaming burial for an equivalent amount of time. 

I am consequently delighted that I got to see the new Nicolas Cage movie in a packed theater. I am even more excited that his newest film is a goddamn masterpiece as well as a surprise blockbuster.

Osgood Perkins wrote and directed a hypnotic horror film that’s redolent of the first season of True Detective and The Silence of the Lambs yet feels exhilaratingly original. 

I’ve devoted years of my life to obsessively studying the films of Nicolas Cage and, to a lesser extent, John Travolta for the Travolta/Cage podcast and The Travolta/Cage Project. 

I’ve seen over a hundred Nicolas Cage movies by this point. I am creepily over-invested in his career and I have never seen him give a performance like he does in Longlegs. 

Cage’s performance as the title character suggests Tiny Tim playing The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill. That should be ridiculous, campy, and full of unintentional laughter. Instead, it’s terrifying. 

Everything about Longlegs is viscerally disturbing. He looks like he has curdled milk running through his veins instead of blood. He’s a real-life bogeyman out of a fractured fairy tale. 

Cage is barely in the first half of Longlegs. He probably has about twenty minutes of screen time, but he doesn’t need more than that to make an indelible impression. 

Writer-director Osgood Perkins never allows us to get comfortable with Longlegs. He’s like the shark in Jaws or Godzilla in Godzilla Minus One in that respect. Every time we’re confronted with Longlegs it’s new and strange and terrifying. It doesn’t seem premature to posit Longlegs as one of the all-time great onscreen villains. 

Scream queen Maika Monroe plays FBI agent Lee Harker. She’s brilliant and obsessive but also awkward in a way that makes people around her uncomfortable. She is, in other words, my glorious Autistic sister, although it is never established that she’s neurodivergent. 

Agent Harker is instead what I like to call Autistish. That’s my new, soon-to-be ubiquitous phrase for characters in movies and television who seem autistic, even if it’s never explicitly established that they are. I was Autistish myself for the first forty-seven years of my life. 

I did not know if I was Autistic, but I had a hunch that I was not as neurotypical as I had deluded myself into believing. My official diagnosis is what moved me from Autistish to Autistic. 

Monroe’s quietly hypnotic performance recalls Jodie Foster’s combination of strength and vulnerability in The Silence of the Lambs and Matthew McConaughey’s enigmatic unknowability as True Detective’s anti-hero. McConaughey’s moody detective is also autistish, which is one of the reasons I relate to him.

Due to possible psychic gifts, the brave and terrified new agent is assigned to investigate a decades-old case of seemingly ordinary fathers and husbands going insane and murdering their entire families as well as themselves after receiving cryptic communication from a mysterious figure known only as Longlegs.

Longlegs is somehow able to facilitate mass murders without being physically present. It’s as if he orders strangers to murder their families through the mail, and they are somehow powerless to resist. 

Agent Harker uncovers a series of cryptic clues about Longlegs’ identity and motives that lead irrevocably to her own traumatic past and tortured relationship with her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), a mentally ill woman with sinister secrets of her own. 

Witt is terrifying as a deeply religious woman whose programming went haywire somewhere and led her to a very dark place. 

Perkins has a Lynchian gift for framing and composition. The images are so powerful and haunting that the camera doesn’t need to move. The writer-director favors long, static shots that trap us in the claustrophobic universe of its characters and do not allow us to escape.

An unrecognizable Cage delivers an extreme performance even by his standards. He keeps us off balance in part by constantly shifting between different voices, each creepier and more unnerving than the last. 

Longlegs haunts the film’s first half without being present. He dominates the second half despite having considerably less screen time than Monroe. 

Longlegs respects the mystery at its core. As the son of the man who played Norman Bates, Perkins knows that nothing deflates a terror tale quite like someone showing up at the end and explaining what has happened and why. 

As with Color Out of Space, Cage’s madness perfectly suits the needs of the film and the filmmaker. 

This isn’t like Deadfall, where Cage is going crazily over the top because he’s clearly bored and wants to amuse himself.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking of Longlegs since I saw it Thursday night. It is a movie that gets under your skin, particularly Cage’s remarkable performance. I’ll see it again as soon as I can, but I also plan on seeing Cage’s other critically acclaimed new horror movie, Arcadian, on Shudder.

I’m excited that Longlegs is a surprise box-office smash. It finished in second place at the box office behind Despicable Me 4, which I saw with my son yesterday. I almost never leave movies early, but at my son’s request, I left Despicable Me 4 before the credits rolled. 

I did not leave because Despicable Me 4 was bad so much as it was lazy, predictable, and commercial. Longlegs seems even more impressive when compared to schlock like Despicable Me 4. 

Longlegs’ commercial success will make it easier for Perkins to make his next movie. It also means that Cage will hopefully spend less time on generic action movies and more time on projects that he believes in. 

Cage produced as well as starred in Longlegs. Hopefully, he’ll continue to lean into his status as an elder statesman of horror rather than return to mercenary trash where he waves around a gun. 

In conclusion, Longlegs is better than Despicable Me 4 and more personal as well.

Four and a half stars out of Five