Stylish direction and clever ideas go a long way to making a great thriller but storytelling weaknesses and an over-hyped central performance ensure that Longlegs remains a flawed film. It is a really good slice of bleak paranoia, but critical hype is currently over-selling what’s on offer.

After demonstrating apparent psychic abilities, FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is re-assigned to a long-running serial killer case. The so-called “Longlegs” killer (Nicolas Cage) somehow manages to manipulate fathers into murdering their wives and children before committing suicide. As Harker investigates further, she finds herself attracting the attention of Longlegs himself.

We don’t really see as many serial killer movies coming out of Hollywood as we used to. Back in the 1990s they were a dime a dozen, headlined by Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and David Fincher’s Seven (1995) but including the likes of Copycat (1995), American Psycho (2000), Natural Born Killers (1994), Kalifornia (1993), and many others. I am not sure if there has been a truly great serial killer narrative since Fincher’s outstanding Zodiac (2007); if there has, it isn’t coming to mind.

Part of the decline of the genre is likely because (thankfully) there are a far fewer real-life serial killers out there. A combination of shifting media environments and improved investigative science has made it much harder for such criminals to succeed. No wonder Longlegs is set in mid-1990s Oregon. It instinctively feels more believable that way.

Back in 2020 I was deeply taken by Osgood Perkins’ fascinating but flawed fairy tale Gretel & Hansel. I can see a lot of it in his latest film Longlegs. It retains the older film’s strong sense of aesthetic and sustained tone. It also plays to an extent with pastiche, taking a well-worn form of horror cinema and infusing it with fresh ideas and interesting characters. Where both films tend to struggle is in story. Longlegs has a potentially great one, until a third act twist forces Osgood’s script to simply throw up its hands and literally explain what the hell is going on.

Up to that point, things are much more entertaining. Maika Monroe is excellent as Lee Harker, playing the character in an awkward and nervous fashion that becomes more understandable as events unfold. It is also a pleasure to see Blair Underwood – always an underrated actor – turn what could easily be a stock stereotype into a likeable and rounded-out character.

Most of the attention on the film – indeed, much of the marketing too – has focused on Nicolas Cage’s performance as the Longlegs killer himself. Great pains have been taken to keeping his appearance and demeanour a secret, and it’s a choice I will respect here. Viewers familiar with the actor will already know there are generally two types of Cage performances anyway, the bottled-up and intense and the wildly unhinged, and his work here is definitely from the latter style. In all honesty it feels under-directed and too over-the-top.

It has been a while since a thriller came to cinemas riding such an enormous wave of hype, and I think such widespread acclaim is always risky. For Longlegs to be mentioned in the company of The Silence of the Lambs or Seven is to invite direct comparison, and it is a comparison in which Longlegs inevitably comes out worse for wear. This is a smart and inventive serial killer thriller, but it is undoubtedly also an imperfect one. With measured expectations, it is definitely worth its audience’s time.