‘Longlegs’ Review: Daddy Danger

Any horror movie that opens, as “Longlegs” does, with a quotation from a British glam-rock hit of the 1970s, suggests a filmmaker with, at the very least, an offbeat sensibility. Even so, this latest feature from the abundantly talented writer and director Osgood Perkins is a puzzler: Stuffed to the rafters with serial-killer clichés — coded messages, creepy dolls, satanic symbols, an androgynous maniac — the plot plays like a sampler of many, more coherent precursors. There’s even a minion dressed as a nun.

And that’s before we attempt to process Nicolas Cage (who else?) as the titular nut case. His appearances are brief, but resounding — and, as can happen with Cage, waver on the brink of parody. Much like the film itself, righted in part by the magnificently bleak mood and prickling sense of premonition that emerge from Andrés Arochi’s mold-colored images. This man can make a deserted, plastic-draped lair look as ominous as hell’s anteroom.

Preparing to enter is Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a rather green F.B.I. agent on the trail of a serial killer who somehow persuades fathers to slaughter their families and then commit suicide. Coded notes, signed “Longlegs,” are left at the crime scenes and law enforcement is stymied. But Lee, who had a disturbing encounter with Longlegs as a child, appears to have a psychic connection with the monster. So, too, does her mother (Alicia Witt), and the two’s haunted, wary relationship thrums with unspoken secrets.

Set in Oregon in the 1990s, “Longlegs” wrestles to maintain its eerily menacing tone. The movie’s echoing spaces — a snowy landscape, Lee’s wondrously gloomy home — and wily performances (especially from Kiernan Shipka as an institutionalized survivor of the killings) are too often undercut by a strangely off-kilter comedy. Much of this resides in Longlegs himself, an apparent victim of botched plastic surgery whom Cage plays as a rhyming-and-singing lunatic beneath a frizzed gray wig. In one amusing scene, as Longlegs enters a hardware store sporting what appear to be slippers and a housedress, he resembles nothing so much as a bizarre amalgam of Buffalo Bill and Tootsie. He should have been a breeze to catch.

Scenes like this one (which benefits from a dry cameo by the director’s daughter, Bea Perkins, as a spectacularly unfazed clerk), in common with random moments throughout the movie, have a dottiness that seems intentional and suggests that Perkins might be messing with us. As chilling and stylish as it is, “Longlegs” is a frustrating pleasure. In films like “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House” (2016) and “The Blackcoats Daughter” (2017), Perkins allowed his gift for ominousness and insinuation to take center stage. Here, we’re never quite sure if his tongue is in his cheek or his hand is on his heart.

Longlegs
Rated R for malevolence, madness and mass murder. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters.