I’m sincerely pleased and relieved to see that Maika Monroe landed on her feet.

Monroe hit a bit of a rough patch, after The Guest and It Follows opened so many doors that The 5th Wave and Independence Day: Resurgence promptly closed. She could’ve easily washed out as another dime-a-dozen pretty young blonde, and Monroe has been absent from mainstream attention for quite a while. But then COVID reset everything. And Monroe struck gold when she played the lead in Watcher, which got her no shortage of praise from those who found it among the year-long dogpile of 2022.

Monroe seems well-positioned to re-introduce herself as a prestige horror icon, going back to what put her on the map in the first place. (Quite literally — there’s an It Follows sequel in development and she’s firmly on board.) And now she’s in a prestige horror film alongside producer Nicolas Cage, coming in hot off his own horror reinvention with Renfield and Dream Scenario. The both of them are working with a script and direction from Osgood Perkins, who last delivered the bugfuck Gretel & Hansel in 2020.

Longlegs is set sometime in the ’90s, and somewhere in Sweet Home Oregon. Where exactly in Oregon? No, I’m seriously asking, where exactly in Oregon is this supposed to be? The film was shot in Vancouver B.C., and I don’t know of anywhere in Oregon that would be consistent with the plot and production design. But I digress.

Monroe plays Lee Harker, an FBI agent who caught such an extremely lucky break (I’ll spare you the long story) that she may in fact be some degree of psychic. Thus she’s reassigned to help Agent Carter (no, not that one, this one’s played by Blair Underwood) to help with a cold case.

All that’s known is that a string of families were brutally slain with no signs of forced entry, and all the murder weapons came from inside the house. There’s nothing to connect these various murders except that all these families had daughters whose birthday fell on the 14th day of the month. There’s also a string of letters found at each crime scene, each one written in such a basic substitution cypher, you’d think the FBI would’ve cracked it long ago. Regardless, the case inexplicably breaks open just as soon as Harker comes on and we’re off to the races.

It’s said as much in the opening credits, so I can safely spoil that Nicolas Cage is playing our serial killer, name of “Longlegs”. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the exact nature of Longlegs. No, seriously, I can’t tell. Even after I’ve seen the entire fucking movie, I still don’t have any idea what this guy’s deal is. Longlegs is a straight-up no-dimensional homicidal lunatic, literally too stupid and manic to function. You’d be amazed his mother had any children that lived. It’s Nicolas Cage doing his most outlandish Jared Leto impression under twenty pounds of makeup. Even taking into account that the film is set in the ’90s, this is some outdated and tasteless threadbare third-rate Silence of the Lambs knockoff bullfuckery.

I hasten to add that the setups and payoffs are all quite elegantly constructed. It’s really quite impressive how the enigmatic statements and ramblings reappear as devastating callbacks in the third act. This only compounds my amazement as to how so much method was wasted on so much crushing madness.

This is a film in which devil worship, black magic, and ESP are all foundational plot elements. The entire plot would literally fall apart without paranormal bullshit to hold it all together, and none of it is deployed in any consistent manner. This is not a movie built to make any kind of logical sense. These filmmakers are not interested in coherent plotting, plausible world-building, or relevant thematic statements.

With this film, Osgood Perkins has firmly established himself as a filmmaker who’s trying his best to operate on an emotional level, rather than a logical one. This movie was solely and aggressively built in pursuit of building mood and atmosphere, throwing metric tons of half-baked Satanic bullshit and obnoxious jump scares at the screen in the hope of getting a visceral reaction. And if the defiant lack of sense makes the audience feel like they’re going insane, so much the better! To quote an old lawyer truism…

If the facts are on your side, pound the facts into the table. If the law is on your side, pound the law into the table. If neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table.

This is the cinematic equivalent of pounding the table. Perkins and his team are trying to be so shocking, so transgressive, so uniquely and memorably over the top that we don’t notice or care how bullshit this is. Unfortunately, this is a crime thriller. And a crime thriller is expected to make some kind of logical sense. I can’t believe I have to explain this, but any halfway decent crime thriller should have consistent logic and a trackable plot so that the audience can feel smarter for playing along.

Going back to the Silence of the Lambs comparison, that movie is a masterpiece because even with an antagonist void of any sense or humanity, it was still a whip-smart and fiendishly clever crime thriller that clearly showed the crime’s solution while also serving up some remarkable feminist commentary.

And lest we forget, as I’ve already stated quite a few times on this blog, there is no shortage of horror films or prestige horror films. The market is oversaturated to such a relentless degree, and this is what these filmmakers are bringing to the table? They’ve got nothing else to offer but a few hamfisted jump scares and transparent sacrilegious imagery? A serial killer plot run by a D-list Zodiac Killer wannabe? By today’s standards of the genre, this shit is embarrassing. Hell, I might even go so far as to say that it’s insulting. Take it back and go the fuck home.

I know from experience that there are certain moviegoers who are happy with a film just as long as it makes them feel a certain way. Longlegs was made for them to the exclusion of all others. It’s hard to sufficiently express how proudly and aggressively nonsensical this film is, how oppressively and comically bleak the atmosphere is, how obnoxious and gratuitous the jump scares are. It’s a film that prioritizes creepiness to the exclusion of any intelligence, novelty, subtlety, or coherent statement.

If you want to see what Maika Monroe can really do in a work of prestige horror, go try Watcher. Hell, I didn’t even like Dream Scenario, but that movie was vastly superior as a prestige horror Nicolas Cage showcase. This one’s a hard pass.