Longlegs.
MA. 101 minutes.
4 stars.
Back in the day a book or a film or a television show that caught everyone's attention might be referred to as a "water-cooler moment", as in people in the office had something to chat about when they found themselves together awkwardly chatting while refilling their water bottles.
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That's what Longlegs is. Like Twin Peaks or The X Files or Silence of the Lambs, all of which it references in style and in intent, it has opened with a buzz around it.
And if that reference hasn't kept up with the times, it is also having a TikTok moment, and is the topic of a bunch of memes being thrown around.
However, some of them are a bit spoiler-ish and this is the kind of film you go to pains not to completely spoil for your friends.
Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is a rookie FBI agent placed onto an investigation of a series of deaths where the common factor is a daughter's birthday on the 14th of the month, the deaths happening on or just after the celebrations.
Quite aside from the coincidence that Harker's birthday is also on the 14th, she is having prescient instincts about the case and the whereabouts of the possible killer, so much so that her case leader, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), has her tested for psychic abilities.
When he is identified by the authorities, it just takes one look at the ultra-creepy doll-maker known as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) to just know he's involved somehow, even if he wasn't present at all of the murders.
Agent Harker has to piece together a series of clues into the how and why as the 14th of the month approaches, hoping to avert another family being slain.
Writer-director Osgood Perkins has set his screenplay in the 1990s just before the ubiquity of the internet and mobile phones.
This is for a number of narrative reasons - that there's local gossip and FBI agents going door-knocking for information rather than just looking something up on Google, for example.
But it also places the film in the same era as The Silence of the Lambs, and Monroe player her Agent Harker like a girl in Clarice Starling cosplay.
Even giving his lead character the surname Harker feels like one of the many breadcrumbs left for the audience, some of which feel subtle while others feel gratingly obvious - Harker being, of course, the name of the lead couple in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins who played Norman Bates in the Psycho movies) references so many horror film elements that you often feel like you know where you're heading.
But every now and then he'll throw you, like the moment a young girl is approached by the creepy Longlegs and she yells out to her dad, "That gross guy's here again."
That gross guy is Cage, who just continues to work and work in what feels like every single project offered to him. But every now and then he is in something great or, as here, is the thing that makes the film great.
Longlegs is a brilliant piece of physical performance, so sad and broken and just like the little girl said, gross.
Cage speaks in a high pitched lilt, he's wearing a few kilograms of prosthetic face makeup and his body is contorted like a century-old film vampire being touched by the sun for the first time.
While there's plenty that isn't new about Osgood's film, Cage's character is new and refreshing and will definitely be Hallowe'en costumes for the next decade.
Osgood's technical crew throw some superb atmospherics around, perfectly gloomy lighting, editing that jars the nerves.
There are some big scares in Longlegs. There's also plenty of esoteric nonsense, but overall the film is effective in its atmospherics.
