“Longlegs ”delivers on creepy tone, with a side order of wacky Nicolas Cage

Starring Maika Monroe and Blair Underwood, this may be the most “your mileage may vary” movie of the summer.

Some people find jazz annoying, yet there’s no place I’d rather be than the Village Vanguard. Some feel cilantro tastes like soap, but don’t bother me with a bowl of chili unless you’ve chopped up some of that precious green herb. And some hoot and holler at just a whiff of Nicolas Cage screaming and hissing and mincing and making bug-eyes. I’ll admit that there was a time when, in small doses, I enjoyed this, too. But I am now at a point where “crazy Nick Cage” feels like a cheap ploy to goose an audience reaction in the absence of anything real.

It’s particularly galling in Longlegs, an otherwise effective horror picture kneecapped by Cage shattering its carefully constructed tone with his untamed braying. But I recognize that for many, Cage’s “let’s break wind in church” approach will be the highlight. Luckily, there isn’t too much of him in this, so if you are on my side of the aisle in this debate, there’s still plenty that’s interesting here.

Longlegs (in theaters Friday) was written and directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) who has positioned himself at the tip of the spear of “vibes cinema.” On paper, there isn’t much that is particularly original in Longlegs, which mixes satanism, cursed dolls, a serial killer, and an FBI investigation. But like the great Miles Davis albums from the late 1960s (see note above re: jazz) it’s more about the tone than the melody.

After a creepy prologue shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio with curved corners to resemble an old photograph, we move to the 1990s (the lack of cell phones and pics of President Clinton cue us) somewhere in the eternally dreary Pacific Northwest. Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is a young FBI agent given an assignment older agents don’t want to do — go door-to-door to try and gather any information about the unusual murders in the area. For decades now, whole families have been periodically wiped out with zero sign of an intruder. Dad kills the wife and kids and then himself with objects found around the house. All that remains is a message, written in a cipher, signed “Longlegs.”

Related: Why you won't see Nicolas Cage's terrifying Longlegs transformation until premiere (exclusive)

While on foot, Lee somehow senses where the newest killer lurks; naturally, her partner brushes this hunch off to his doom. After an evaluation, it is determined that Lee has some kind of ESP and is partnered with Carter (Blair Underwood) who has long been on the case. By this point in the film, Perkins has already been deploying an unsettling use of short lenses — just enough to distort the frame, but not too much to go full Christmas ball — and slow zooms. By the time Lee is laying index cards on the carpet, the texture of each interior vibrates with an other-worldly creepiness, thanks to high contrast lighting and a color scheme of coagulated blood. An original score by Zigli occasionally chimes in with The Shining-esque synthesizers, just in case you needed something else to put you on edge.

As Lee ruffles through microfiche and has occasional phone calls with her religious fundamentalist mother (Alicia Witt), she and Carter walk through the paces of a typical detective movie — but there’s something that is fundamentally off. There’s no reason for it, unlike Al Pacino’s lack of sleep in Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, and it isn’t played for genre-crossed laughs, as in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. But everything about the way these characters conduct themselves proves that this movie does not exist entirely in our world.

As the investigation continues, and Lee starts making diagrams on graph paper to predict the timing of the next killing, the stage is cleared for Nicolas Cage to make his grand entrance. With radical makeup resembling Ron Perlman in the '80s Beauty and the Beast TV show if he were a mime, Cage’s villain (the titular Longlegs) makes it clear that he’s only a representative of “Mr. Downstairs.” I’ll let you figure out who that is supposed to be.

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In his few scenes, Cage screeches and makes oooga-booga sounds, and I’ve already made it abundantly clear that I found this irritating. But I will give credit both to him and Perkins: nobody holds anything back in this film.

Related: Nicolas Cage's Longlegs teaser gives us 85 seconds of gnomic dread

As for the mystery itself, it’s nothing too shocking, but it all makes a kind of internal sense. There is a solid bit of gore as well as some effective jump-scares, in addition to the overall tenor of unease. I’m a little tired of supernatural dolls by this point, but the ones seen here are sufficiently disquieting. Maybe it’s because one of them gets an autopsy.

Though the marketing campaign for Longlegs may have you thinking this is a thrill ride, it really isn’t that kind of movie at all. It is deliberately paced with many a quiet moment, and it doesn’t have a huge on-screen body count. There are plenty of dark clouds, rain, and snow, too, which might be a draw during this heat dome summer. What’s most impressive is how Perkins collects his simple component parts and somehow transforms this into such an unnerving film. Longlegs is definitely a step above the others. Grade: B 

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