Longlegs (2024)

 Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 11, 2025

When I watched Longlegs on opening night last summer, I sat in an invested audience. All of us were in sync: gasping in unison, lurching in our seats as though tandem marionettes. Psyched for the latest “scariest movie in years” contender, this crowd paid rapt, anxious attention from the oddly aspect-ratio’d opening until the bitter end.

Directed by Osgood Perkins, the son of the star of Psycho, Longlegs works because it builds on the serial killer story made famous by The Silence of the Lambs. Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is our Clarice, an aloof FBI rookie with a knack for patterns, and she’s hunting a ritualistic killer (Nicolas Cage) who goes by Longlegs in coded missives left at the scene. The case is tricky—Longlegs seemingly induces gruesome murders—and it hits close to home for Harker, but the pursuit of the man responsible proceeds as you’d expect.

What elevates Longlegs is that it’s in conversation with Silence of the Lambs but never settles into tired homage. Perkins litters his film with unsettling elements, leaving audience members spinning a roulette wheel of fear. In one stretch near the midpoint, Harker and his boss (a stately Blair Underwood) explore an abandoned farmhouse, unearth an uncanny valley doll, and interview a child-like woman corrupted by shadowy forces. Across its runtime, you’ve got three or four incredible jump scares, gorgeous Dutch-angled cinematography, and a game-for-it Cage dialed up to eleven as Michael Jackson-meets-Freddy Kruger. The whole time, you feel this throbbing dread because you know Longlegs is going somewhere, and even though you have no idea where that is, you’re confident it’ll be bad.

Granted, this kitchen sink cookie approach to horror has its drawbacks. Longlegs is a busy movie; none of its threads disrupt the twisting tension, but not all perfectly line up on closer inspection. The artistry of the elevated horror breaks the immersion at times, scratching my cInEmA itch when it aims for my adrenal gland, and Cage at eleven is really more like seventeen, which some viewers reasonably find grating. I love the result—this made my top ten for 2024—but I know that it’s not a perfect movie, even setting aside that some simply can’t stomach horror’s nightmare fuel in the first place.

My best sales pitch for Longlegs might be this: I think the film plays like a great rollercoaster. When you watch it in a dark room, absorbing its every rise and fall, your breaths quicken. You leap when Harker leaps; you shield your eyes when the heavy axe swings. But when the whole thing’s over, you’re energized. You survived a tightly calibrated, harrowing thrill ride. That’s only possible with fantastic filmmaking.

I’d call Longlegs fantastic filmmaking.

Longlegs is available to stream on Hulu and rent on most platforms.