Review: 'Longlegs' is an unsettling serial-killer thriller, brilliantly acted by Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage

Writer-director Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs” is a horror movie that’s more creepily disturbing than jump-scare shocking — but its unsettling images will stick in the mind long after it’s over.

There’s a serial killer at work in Oregon, in the mid-1990s, and the FBI is on the case. A young special agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), is out with her partner, knocking on doors — and she senses immediately which house the killer is in. Her partner doesn’t believe her, and ends up dead.

Lee’s commander, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), suspects the young agent has some psychic talent, though she chalks it up to just being observant. She also finds patterns in the evidence Carter gives her, taken from 10 killings over the last 30 years. In each, the father of the house brutally murdered his family and then killed himself. And in each, the authorities found a cryptic note, signed by someone who calls themself “Longlegs.”

But there’s something else in Lee’s history that may be at play. Maybe her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), has memories of when Lee was 9 (played in flashbacks by Lauren Acala). And maybe the mysterious figure who left a note in her home, written in the same cryptic code as the killer’s writing.

Part of the mystery is clear to the audience from the movie’s first scene, when 9-year-old Lee encounters a strange old man. Perkins shoots the man from a child’s point of view, so we barely glimpse his face, until he leans down to engage the girl — and we see he’s played by Nicolas Cage. The effect is similar to what happened when audiences first saw Kevin Spacey in “Seven”: However disturbing you thought things were going to be, they just became much worse.

Cage’s performance is, once again, proof that when the guy really puts his back into it, he’s the most arresting actor around. (The last time, in my estimation, was three years ago in “Pig.”) Cage’s collaboration here with Perkins creates a truly terrifying horror character, who could be a psychopath or something far more sinister.

The reason Perkins’ pervasive emotional darkness is so striking, though, is that Monroe is the light around which it tries to coalesce. Monroe, so adept at playing against the “scream queen” stereotypes in “It Follows” and “Watcher,” plays the young FBI agent with understated intelligence and a core of iron. Monroe makes “Longlegs” something deeper and more resonant than your typical psycho killer thriller.

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‘Longlegs’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 12, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody violence, disturbing images and some language. Running time: 101 minutes.