You could easily mistake "Longlegs" for "just another serial killer flick", said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. But, in fact, it is something far rarer: "a horror film that gives you a bona fide case of the heeby-jeebies".
Set in Oregon in the 1990s, it stars Maika Monroe as FBI agent Lee Harker, whose uncanny, almost supernatural, talent for rooting out murderers lands her with a special assignment: to track down an elusive suspect dubbed Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). His MO is to persuade previously respectable men to murder their own wives and children, and then to kill themselves.
The idea that drives "Longlegs", an idea "shared by only the very best horror films", is a thoroughly terrifying one – "that true horror does not reside in something outside menacing us, but the thoughts we can't control bubbling up inside of us".
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"Only about once every two or three years does a horror-thriller as good as Longlegs lope into view," said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. Director Osgood Perkins fills every "sickly vista" with "an inescapable menace"; and "nested away" within the film is "perhaps the most terrifying performance of Cage's career".
In the first half, we only get "cropped glimpses" of him – but "brace yourself for his strangely motherly set of lips", his "hideous wig", his habit of "gradually screaming", and his penchant for "nonsense rhymes".
"Nerve-jangling and devilishly bleak, 'Longlegs' is easily the front-runner for the scariest movie of 2024," said Jen Yamato in The Washington Post. Cage "cranks the dial, sealing his 'Longlegs' as one of the great horror villains"; and "even the end credits are cleverly designed to ensure viewers linger in a state of visceral unease, letting the dread sink in".
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