It states its intentions right away. The first minutes of Longlegs—surely the scariest movie you’ll see this year—involve a rural road, a station wagon, and a little girl who encounters an unexpected man in her front yard. The sequence is eerie and then, all at once, it’s terrifying—and represents only the first of the jolts and shocks to come.
That little girl will grow up to be Lee Harker, an FBI agent played with mesmerizing control by Maika Monroe, whom you may barely recognize here. (The man in her yard is Nicolas Cage, and you definitely won’t recognize him.) It’s not that it’s a surprise to see Monroe in a horror film—the best movies on her resume are all that (or close): The Guest, It Follows, Watcher–but she’s usually cast to type: pretty, blonde, all-American. Here, Monroe is a haunted, highly disciplined, intuitive weirdo; an investigator trying to solve a set of serial murders, very much in the mold of Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs, a movie this one emulates. Cage, beneath prosthetics and makeup, is the movie’s monster—a satan-worshiping doll-maker—but he doesn’t carry this movie scene to scene. That’s Monroe, playing an enigma who spooks as much as she’s spooked. “I had to kind of tap into something different for this one,” she admits.
She also had to fight for the part. It’s a charmingly self-effacing story she’s been telling in interviews lately: “I read the script and was completely obsessed. And then I met Os,” she says, referring to the movie’s talented writer-director Osgood Perkins (son of the late Anthony Perkins). To prepare, she’d re-watched Lambs and studied what Jodie Foster had done, and she came away feeling good. But then: “I got a call from my team and they were like, you know, he just doesn’t think you’re right for this role.” Crestfallen but undeterred, she made an audition tape.
“When you talk to me, the type of person that I am—I’m very different from this role,” Monroe says. “But this is my job. I’m an actor. My job is to transform and change.” Her tape won her the part. “And I really appreciated that: that I had to work and prove it not only to him, but to myself.”
Wardrobe helped too. Longlegs is set in the Pacific Northwest, mostly in 1993, and Harker is dressed to match the woodsy, overcast atmosphere: beige suits, cream blouses, dark, flat hair. Promoting Longlegs has given Monroe, who works with the stylists Chloe and Chenelle Delgadillo, a chance to go to fashion extremes. Witness the Courrèges bra and skirt she wore to the movie’s Los Angeles premiere. (“I’ve never worn less, ever.”) But the film dresses her way, way down and nearly hides her in plain sight.
Which is appropriate for a character beset by repression. Monroe worked hard on Harker’s mannerisms, her ruthless air of control. “She experiences something incredibly traumatic at a young age,” Monroe says. “For anyone, that kind of shapes who you are as an adult.”
Trauma narratives are everywhere in film and TV these days, but Longlegs’s carefully turned, carefully twisted plot goes in unexpected directions. There’s a mystery at its center—unsolved killings, coded messages, occult references—but the jolting reveals are not quite what you expect. Among Monroe’s many talents is her ability to portray fear, a skill she deploys freely here as she circles closer to the demented Cage. “It’s just so easy for me at this point to tap into that,” says Monroe, whose first job as a child actress was not a sunny Disney or Nickelodeon show (she kept not booking those), but a short film where she played an abused teen about to commit suicide.
“An early sign,” she jokes. Dark material comes naturally to her. “Like, I know exactly where I need to go.”
