Longlegs is Osgood Perkins's audacious, unsettling horror film — the most genuinely disturbing wide-release American horror movie in years — starring Maika Monroe as Lee Harker, an FBI agent with an inexplicable intuitive gift for anticipating the movements of a serial killer whose cases have confounded law enforcement for decades. The killer is Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), a figure whose crimes are so strange and so consistent over thirty years that the FBI has never been able to identify a pattern. Lee is assigned to the case by her supervisor (Blair Underwood) and immediately begins to sense a connection to the murders that goes beyond professional insight — something more personal, more dreadful, and harder to name.

Perkins shoots Longlegs with the compositional precision and ambient dread of classic European horror, building unease through framing, sound design, and a color palette that feels perpetually overexposed and wrong. Monroe delivers one of the finest horror performances in recent memory — introverted, strange, perceptive in ways she cannot explain — and she grounds the film when Cage threatens to tip it into pure expressionism. And Cage's Longlegs is extraordinary: a creation of pure theatricality and genuine menace, a figure so physically committed and so free of vanity that the performance crosses from alarming into something closer to awe.

Longlegs became one of the biggest horror hits of 2024, distributed by NEON and earning more than $70 million on a tiny budget. It divided critics who wanted conventional horror mechanics and won passionate admirers who recognized Perkins as a filmmaker working in a mode closer to Argento or Lynch than to mainstream genre filmmaking. It streams on Hulu and rewards multiple viewings for viewers willing to let it work on its own unsettling terms.