After a brief opening sequence set in the 1970s, which the film will later return to, most of Osgood Perkins’s newly released “Longlegs” takes place in a grim and austere version of Oregon in the 1990s. A series of brutal murder-suicides have been occurring across the state for the last 30 years, and when an inexplicable gift of clairvoyance is revealed while on the hunt for a serial killer with a colleague, newly recruited FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is tapped for the cold case. It’s a set-up that presents Perkins’s horror film as part of a mode of investigative thrillers, as it works to unsettle, and even strike fear in its audience.
In that brief opening scene, a young girl is approached by a man whose face is obscured for much of the scene, but whose malevolent voice does enough to strike unease. Although we can’t quite see him, and the glimpses of makeup on his face might not help to place him, we know it is Nicolas Cage. The film’s opening credits feature “Nicolas Cage as Longlegs” stirring our anticipation. Just as he leans into her, to give us a clearer sense of what he looks like, the scene ends. It’s a skill for building anticipation that’s probably Perkins’ most effective attribute in “Longlegs”. Perkins is good at inciting expectation. A languorous pause somewhere we might expect swiftness. A sudden cutaway somewhere else we might expect a sustained tension. A promise of something that makes you hold your breath waiting for something. But by halfway into “Longlegs”, there is a suggestion that you might be holding your breath for something that cannot materialise. And by the end of it, you realise that you’re suffocating on nothingness.