If you’ve ever wished The Silence of the Lambs had more cursed dolls, occult geometry, and Nicolas Cage looking like a demon drag mime who hasn’t slept since 1963, Longlegs is the movie your therapist warned you about. Osgood Perkins takes the bare bones of an FBI vs. serial killer story and dresses it in something warped, ritualistic, and deeply wrong—in a very satisfying way.
This is one of those rare horror films that manages to be genuinely unnerving and kind of grimly funny, mostly because everyone on screen is either painfully repressed, cosmically doomed, or Nicolas Cage.
The Case: Satan, Triangles, and Dads with Terrible Impulse Control
Set in 1990s Oregon, Longlegs follows Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), an FBI agent whose whole vibe is “haunted photocopy technician who accidentally joined law enforcement.” She’s assigned to a cold case cluster of murder–suicides: fathers slaughtering their families and then themselves, each leaving behind a letter full of Satanic codes signed “Longlegs.” No fathers share handwriting, but the letters do.
That’s already upsetting, and then the film slowly makes it worse. Lee discovers patterns:
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Every family has a 9-year-old daughter.
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Each daughter was born on the 14th of some month.
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Each family dies within a week of the girl’s birthday.
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The dates form an occult triangle on a calendar—with one date missing.
It’s the kind of pattern that would make any normal person move to another country and start a bakery, but Lee just quietly pushes her glasses up (emotionally speaking) and keeps going.
What makes the case compelling isn’t just the Satanic trappings but the way the film presents them: every clue feels like it’s been pulled from a mildew-stained basement. The letters, the dolls, the dates, the symbolism—it all feels cursed, like your brain shouldn’t be parsing it.
Maika Monroe: The Awkward Psychic You Actually Believe In
Lee Harker is not your typical cool, quippy FBI lead. She’s withdrawn, stiff, and clearly not built for small talk. Everything about her suggests a person who’s functional but deeply, weirdly misaligned with the normal world.
Oh, and she might be clairvoyant.
Perkins plays this very quietly. Lee doesn’t announce “I see things” or have flashy visions; she just seems to know things she shouldn’t, decoding Longlegs’ messages with unnerving ease. Instead of turning her into a superhero, the film makes her feel like a glitch—someone reality has nudged out of place for reasons it refuses to explain.
Maika Monroe sells it beautifully. She underplays almost everything, which is exactly why it works. Surrounded by occult insanity and Nicolas Cage at his most feral, she grounds the film without ever feeling like a normal person. Her stillness becomes its own kind of horror: you can tell she’s been living with something wrong inside her head for a very long time.
Nicolas Cage: The Human Jump Scare
Let’s not pretend we’re not here for him. Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs (real name Dale Ferdinand Kobble, because of course it is) looks like someone put a children’s birthday clown through an industrial Satan filter. Pale makeup, lank hair, cracked voice—he’s the kind of guy you wouldn’t sit next to on public transportation even if it was the last seat.
The brilliance of the performance is that it almost tips into parody but never quite does. He’s ridiculous and terrifying at the same time, like a cursed meme. He talks about “the man downstairs” with the kind of manic religious fervor that makes you want to wash your hands after he speaks.
When he finally lands in the interrogation room, it’s not some Hannibal Lecter intellectual showdown. It’s a spiritual nightmare. Longlegs has already won in ways the FBI can’t even see, and Cage plays him like a man who knows the punchline to a joke everyone else is still setting up. His self-inflicted, brutally physical exit from the film is so violent and abrupt that you almost laugh from shock—dark, deranged laughter, the kind you’re a little ashamed of.
The Real Horror: Family
For all its demon-summoning and coded letters, Longlegs is a family horror movie wearing a serial killer’s skin. The deeper Lee goes, the more the case coils back toward her own home, her own history, her own mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), who has the brittle religiosity of someone who thinks God is watching—and judging—her every blink.
The film’s nastiest twist is that Longlegs hasn’t just been out there, hunting strangers. He’s been in the Harker home the whole time. As Lee’s visions and memories unravel, we learn:
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He visited her on her 9th birthday.
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He threatened to kill her unless Ruth obeyed him.
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Ruth, trying to save her daughter, became his delivery system.
Those creepy dolls that turn patriarchs into family-killing puppets? Longlegs builds them in the Harker basement like satanic Etsy commissions. Ruth delivers them disguised as a nun, the world’s worst DoorDash. And Lee’s own doll, nestled among her childhood belongings, has been suppressing her memories while nudging her along occult pathways.
That’s the real gut punch: her own mother is both victim and accomplice, saint and sinner in the most literal, bloody way. When Ruth finally snaps fully into the role of active threat—shooting Agent Browning in cold blood, lunging at Ruby with a dagger—you realize the film has been quietly priming her as its real monster all along. Longlegs is the catalyst; Ruth is the implementation.
Happy Mother’s Day.
Osgood Perkins: Patron Saint of Slow, Sick Dread
Perkins directs horror like someone gently turning a screw into your skull. The 70s prologue with the girl and her Polaroid camera sets the template: soft light, weirdly quiet tension, the sense that something demonic is happening in the exact same room you’re in but just out of focus.
The 90s setting never turns into nostalgia bait. It’s just analog enough to feel estranged from modern slickness: landlines, paper files, Polaroids, handwritten codes. Evil here feels tactile. You can imagine it under your fingernails.
He’s also not afraid of stillness. Scenes linger a second too long. Faces sit in silence while information sinks in. The horror isn’t in jump scares (though there are a few brutal ones); it’s in the feeling that reality has been slightly rewired and everyone’s trying very hard not to panic about it.
When the Devil’s Playlist Hits Home
The final act, centered around William Carter’s family and his daughter Ruby’s 9th birthday, ties every thread into one big occult knot. The missing date on the triangle is that day. Ruth has delivered the doll. The “curse” is already in motion.
What follows is domestic carnage that’s as emotionally brutal as it is visceral:
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William, a man we’ve come to trust, murders his wife under the doll’s influence.
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Lee has to shoot him to save Ruby—killing her mentor right after learning the full horror of her own upbringing.
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Ruth lunges for Ruby, dagger in hand, and Lee is forced to kill her mother too.
So in the span of minutes, Lee kills her boss, her mother, and the last chance at pretending she’s just an FBI agent on a weird case. The occult triangle is stopped, but at the cost of whatever remained of her normal life.
The last beat—Lee trying to destroy Ruby’s doll while her gun refuses to fire—lands like a cosmic joke. Evil doesn’t vanish because the killer died or the ritual was interrupted. It lingers. Dolls remain. Children grow up. Cycles repeat. The man downstairs is patient.
Final Verdict: Disturbing, Hypnotic, and Darkly Funny in All the Wrong Ways
Longlegs isn’t a fun horror movie, but it is a deeply satisfying one if you like your scares unclean and your narratives cruel. It’s:
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A serial killer thriller that feels possessed by something older and stranger.
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A family drama that replaces healing with inevitability.
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A satanic story where the devil doesn’t need to show up—humans do plenty.
Maika Monroe gives you a protagonist who looks like she could crack or ascend at any second; Nicolas Cage gives you a villain who seems like he already has. Together, they anchor a film that crawls under your skin and quietly rearranges the furniture.
If you walk out feeling unsettled, slightly amused, and weirdly suspicious of dolls, birthday parties, and your own mother, congratulations: the movie worked.
