“Long Legs”: This is the new thriller starring Nicolas Cage

The opening scene could have come from an old home video: washed-out colors, grainy 4:3 format, rounded corners, you almost think you can hear the projector rattle.

A lonely house stands in an idyllic winter landscape. A car is parked in front of the garden fence, but no one gets out. A little girl, perhaps eight or nine, cautiously walks out of the house. From a safe distance, it tries to identify the person sitting in the car. In a slow zoom, the camera follows the child’s fearful gaze. The tense silence gives way to a suspicion: it is not a friendly visitor who has come here, but an intruder.

Invisible terror is a time-tested device in psychological thrillers and horror films. As a rule of thumb, the less obvious the threat, the better. – Norman Bates’s mother Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho The alien life forms in Ridley Scott’s Alien and the serial killer in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs all operate on this principle, and it’s how filmmaker Oz Perkins structures the opening of his thriller Long Legs.

FBI agents hunt down serial killer Long Legs

While the child watches her, his gaze wandering through the garden, a stranger suddenly appears before the girl, shocking her. The camera looks up at the child from his perspective; he doesn’t quite fit into the repressed image: long legs, unkempt hair falling over his shoulders and a pale, flabby chin can be seen. He speaks to the girl in a trembling whisper, trying to win her trust. The child stands there motionless, barely able to move.

After this encounter, the film jumps to the present day, and thus to a wider format of images. Young FBI agent Lee Harker is hunting down a serial killer named Long Legs. Over the decades, he has convinced several fathers to kill their entire families. You can already guess: the stranger from the beginning is Long Legs, and Harker is the little girl.

Faded home videos are her repressed memories. Lee Harker herself has not yet realized that she knew him as a child, and she must dig into her own subconscious to convict him. Gradually, her inspiration leads her deeper into the killer’s twisted psyche, filled with Satanic confession letters, nuns, and creepy dolls.

Oz Perkins is the son of Psycho actor Anthony Perkins

Director Oz Perkins doesn’t even try to distance himself from the classics and genre standards, but moves between them in a relaxed way. It’s a smart move, especially since he is already associated with horror and psychological thrillers without being involved himself: his father, Anthony Perkins, had one of the most iconic horror roles as the mother’s son Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic “Psycho”. Oz Perkins now brings to his character a textbook blend of family trauma, dark secrets and primal fears.

With this self-deprecating attitude, Oz Perkins also pulled off a neat trick: Unlike Huck, audiences eagerly awaited not only the horror but also the film’s secret star: the title character played by Nicolas Cage—a cleverly marketed miniseries.—In appearance, Cage “lives up to his reputation as a specialist in bizarre characters and reinterprets the golden rule: even an invisible cage is still a cage.”

Maika Monroe as Agent Harker

Fortunately, Perkins doesn’t get lost in this meta level, instead relying on a tried-and-true narrative formula between The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, and Zodiac. He’s able to maintain the tension of the opening scene largely thanks to leading lady Maika Monroe. Her character alongside Huck, whose nervous resolve easily matches the role models Oz Perkins had in mind when writing the script—Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs or Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween.

Ever since her role in It Follows (2014), Maika Monroe has been considered one of the most important genre actresses of her generation, and yes, she makes that clear here.

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