Sometimes…shit just hits different…

In this business, hyperbole can be a beast but in theatres today; Longlegs takes the serial killer genre and turns it on its ear with a dark, slick and moody affair that seeps into your skin with a sense of visual brutality and a performance from Nicolas Cage that takes the iconic ‘Cage Rage’ to a different gear that we as an audience never see coming as it comes off like a shot of Triple Espresso injected directed into the jugular vein.

In pursuit of a serial killer, an FBI agent (Maika Monroe) uncovers a series of occult clues that she must solve to end his terrifying killing spree.

By blending a mesh of classic tropes from the genre, Longlegs ramps up the tension by painting a bleak and angular world that is out of time and trapped in the madness of the moment.  This film has filthiness to it that you can’t help to want to marinate in while the credits roll.

All the credit in the world has to go to writer/director Oz Perkins because in many ways this film feels like you are watching it through a fisheye lens perspective that has been stapled into your retinas and frontal cortex.

Perkins crafts, lights and designs this universe out of time to the point that even in moments of ease we as a viewer can’t help but be on edge.

Perkins isn’t tell a story here, but rather he’s placing us inside of a frame of mind of the palpable drabness of middle America that bore the rise of the obsession of the Satanic Panic and renders it in such an unexpected way that you simply become engulfed by it all.

The script moves at a solid pace and even Monroe as our FBI Agent with an extra layer of intuition is not even a hero in it all but rather a victim to the horrors of knowing that she has to help in order to the right thing. While Monroe easily carries the fragility of being thrust into her task, the real magic here is the man himself, Nicolas Cage.

We barely see his character exist uninterrupted in the frame and masked with a degree of obscurity but that only adds to the physical dread of it all.  In what is quite probably the best performance of his ‘weird’ period; Cage isn’t just playing a maniacal killer here, but rather he’s inhabiting a creature that we’ll never understand and always be uneasy of, even when his locked up in chains.  He’s embodying the kind of evil that transcends the trappings of the law enforcement universe that we find ourselves in, with the heroes of the story, seemingly a half step behind.

Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt round it all out by adding some extra layers of tragedy that Monroe’s character has to sort through.

Longlegs thrusts us into the perspective of having to confront the unimaginable on so many levels because it’s odd, off putting and even morbidly funny enough at times to make you believe in every single solitary frame of it.