‘Longlegs’ Review:

Given how cinema is engulfed in the so-called Easter egg culture, it’s tempting to over-read the presence of glam-rock signifiers in Oz Perkins’s Longlegs. T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” serves as both its epigraph and closing credits accompaniment. And an album cover of Lou Reed’s Transformer appears prominently above the eponymous menace’s mirror. But glam rock offers less of a skeleton key to the film than a guide on how to watch it.

The flamboyant early-1970s subgenre of rock music, which sought to upend rock’s hegemonic hypermasculinity with androgyny and gender fluidity, was a promise of liberation to its fans. How something begins its life isn’t how it must always present itself. So also goes Longlegs, a sturdily constructed horror film with a foundation sneakily built on shifting sands.

Perkins immediately harkens back to familiar ’90s horror thrillers, as if trying to put the audience as ease. For one, the film’s shamelessly cribs from The Silence of the Lambs. Like Clarice Starling, Perkins’s protagonist, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), is a rare female F.B.I. agent at a time when men dominated the bureau. And as the story progresses, she also seems to share an unlikely connection, if not a reluctant kinship, with a serial killer wreaking havoc.

But Lee doesn’t have the luxury of starting with her tormentor, the criminal mastermind Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) tied to a string of home murders, behind bars. Her boss (Blair Underwood) tasks her with decoding a series of the fugitive’s cryptic messages left at the scenes of grisly murder-suicides in Pacific Northwest family homes. These ominous notes recall the crime scene leave-behind notes of David Fincher’s 1995 breakout Se7en, and they contain written ciphers that also harken back to Fincher’s later Zodiac. “I’m telling you,” a skeptical fellow agent speculates about Lee’s acumen, “she’s not ready for this.” She disproves her doubters, however, but not entirely because she possesses preternatural investigative skills.

Lee has a sinking sense that Longlegs chose her to solve his case. Cracking his symbolic language is less the answer to a riddle than the entrance to a psychological maze, one in which Lee must face down lingering tensions from her past. The route to cracking the case runs through her pious mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt). Lee maintains a polite détente with Ruth over the religious strictures she’s abandoned since leaving home. But the increasingly spiritual and occult overtones of the killings necessitate a deeper re-engagement with her mother’s beliefs.

It’s here that Perkins rises above merely paying homage to the aforementioned ’90s horror films and channels another one to which he’s more indirectly indebted: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. The twist in Longlegs, though, exists more at a thematic level than as a plot point. Perkins slowly and slyly adjusts the stakes of the film until they become unmistakably different from where they began. Like the slaughters of entire families that Longlegs precipitates, these events strike with such surprise because they seem to originate from a basis of shared trust.

This storytelling choice works because it puts the audience in the same headspace as Lee, forced to reconsider past observations and postulations based on newly gained knowledge of their sinister undercurrents. It also provides a narrative analog to Perkins’s position outside the film. He’s someone who seems to be a benevolent guide through a confusing and often scary world. But he’s not above using that powerful perch to manipulate and deceive.

The downside of this decision is that Longlegs becomes too often defined by what it is not. The film thankfully sidesteps the current trend of “metaphorror,” in which the monster proves to be little more than a manifestation of the protagonist’s deep-seated trauma. But Perkins also misses a chance to more forcefully communicate what Longlegs is on its own terms. All the time spent defying conventions never results in rewriting any of them.

That slight empty feeling, though, only sets in after Longlegs concludes. Perkins deploys Monroe like a precision tool to amplify the creeping dread within his sparsely populated frames. Her frequently inscrutable expressions serve a dual purpose, standing in for the audience while hinting at suppressed sensations ready to spill over at any moment. Monroe, like Perkins, delivers work that’s consistently riveting but only sporadically revelatory.