Longlegs: Nicolas Cage gives a monstrous performance

Osgood Perkins’s latest feature is a significant leap in his engagement with horror. I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House (2016) and Gretel and Hansel (2020) were atmospheric arthouse excursions into haunting and folkloresque, beautifully framed and considered, yet slow-paced and airless, with directive voice-overs. Longlegs strips out the languorous edits and exposition for a leaner, off-kilter energy, powered by the central performances of a spooked Maika Monroe as an FBI investigator and a wigged out (in every sense) Nicolas Cage as the killer she pursues.

Monroe – who played the iconic young lead of the seminal horror It Follows (2014) – plays Lee Harker, an oppressed and anxious rookie FBI agent whose flashes of uncanny psychic intuition crack open the impenetrable thickets of signs and sigils around a gruesome series of incidents of families who appear to have slaughtered themselves over the past twenty years…