Review: In chilling thriller ‘Longlegs’, Maika Monroe cuts like a knife

A chilling, half-remembered childhood encounter hangs over “Longlegs,” Osgood Perkins’ elegantly composed 1990s horror. film about a young FBI agent (Maika Monroe) whose past seems to hold the key to a decades-long wave of suburban serial killers.

In the opening flashback scene of “Longlegs,” a young woman leaves her house to find a stranger in her snow-covered backyard. We never see more than the lower half of her face, but the goosebumps are overwhelming. The image, with a scream, cuts away before “Longlegs” properly begins.

Twenty-five years later, that girl (Monroe’s Lee Harker) has now grown up and been brought into the investigation. She is preternaturally good at decoding the serial killer’s choreographed targets, but her psychological cunning has a blind spot. In Osgood’s gripping yet banal horror film about an elusive bogeyman, the most unnerving mystery is the hazy, fractured nature of childhood memory.

“Longlegs,” which opens in theaters on Thursday, is arriving on its own wave of mystery thanks to a long and enigmatic marketing campaign. Is tinnitus guaranteed? That may depend on your tolerance for a very serious procedural that’s extremely adept at building up a menacing slow burn, but which nonetheless leads to a buildup of horror tropes: satanic worship, creepy dolls, and a strange Nicolas Cage.

It’s a credit to the harrowing and riveting first half of “Long Legs” — and to Monroe — that the film’s third act disappoints. After this prologue – presented in a square format with rounded edges, as if seen through an overhead projector – the screen enlarges. Harker, a terse and lonely detective, is part of a large task force to track down the killer behind the deaths of 10 families over 30 years. Sent to knock on doors, she looks up at a second-story window and knows immediately. “It’s the one,” she tells a partner (Dakota Daulby) whose lack of faith in her intuition quickly becomes regrettable.

Harker is taken for a psychological evaluation that demonstrates her strange clairvoyance. Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) gives her all the accumulated evidence, which suggests the same killer – each crime scene has a coded letter signed by Longlegs – but at the moment does not point to any intruders in the homes of the murdered. Carter remembers Charles Manson. “Manson had accomplices,” recalls Harker. Also troubling: All of the victims have a daughter whose birthday is on the 14th of the month, a trait that Harker, naturally, shares.

Families also feature prominently in the narrative. Harker occasionally visits his reclusive mother (Alicia Witt), and their brief interactions suggest an awareness of the cruelty of the world. Once on the phone, Harker said she was busy with “work stuff.”

“Nasty things?” the mother asks. “Yes,” she responds.

Scenes of terror follow as they hunt the killer in rural Oregon. They frequent the usual places: an old crime scene, a locked barn, an old witness in a psychiatric hospital. Longlegs (Cage) is also hiding and leaves a letter for Harker. We see him fleetingly at the beginning. He is a pale, bleached figure who, with long white hair, looks increasingly clownish the closer we get to him. If Manson belonged to the 60s, Longlegs, with his Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder Revue white facelooks more like a product of the 70s. T.Rex opens and closes the film and Lou Reed’s “Transformer” album cover hangs above his mirror.

Perkins (“Gretel & Hansel”), is the filmmaker son of Anthony Perkins, who played one of the most disturbing characters in cinema in Norman Bates’ “Psycho”. The roots of “Longlegs,” which Perkins also wrote, have personal connections for the director, Perkins said, about his own upbringing and his father’s complicated private life. But something deeper struggles to pierce “Longlegs.” Its sense of horror seems to come mostly from little other than other films. “Se7en” and “The Silence of the Lambs” are clear touchstones. -screen container for Cage.

Either way, this is Monroe’s movie. His compelling screen presence in films like “It Follows” and “Observer” earned her the title of today’s most prominent “Scream Queen”. But she is much more than a single-gender talent. Repeatedly in “Longlegs,” Monroe’s Harker faces a singularly disturbing scenario and walks right in. It’s not that she’s not nervous; Her heavy breathing is part of Eugenio Battaglia’s artistic sound design. Monroe, tough and strong, cuts like a knife through this almost cartoonishly severe film. Nasty things? Yes.

“Longlegs,” a Neon release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for bloody violence, disturbing images and some language. Running time: 101 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.