Only about once every two or three years does a horror-thriller as good as Longlegs lope into view. It crackles with eerie dread. Nested away is perhaps the most terrifying performance of Nicolas Cage’s career – among the funniest, too. But you’ll barely recognise him from the tiny, cropped glimpses we get in the first half.
The setup is pure Silence of the Lambs, using a mid-1990s timeframe to honour that homage in look as well as essence. Maika Monroe, rattled and uneasy from minute one as if she’s never shaken off It Follows, plays Lee Harker, a rookie FBI agent assigned to a case in Oregon that’s been baffling authorities for decades. A dozen families have been killed, in each instance at the hands of the father, while cryptic messages suggest a figure named Longlegs is somehow the puppeteer.
“He murders them, but not in person,” is the way Lee’s boss (a sterling Blair Underwood) succinctly puts it. Unravelling this occult mystery falls to Lee, who has proved herself unusually intuitive – borderline psychic – in making snap deductions: take the identikit cul-de-sac where she manages to point to the exact house where slaughter has just occurred.
