Main cast: Maika Monroe (Lee Harker), Blair Underwood (Agent William Carter), Alicia Witt (Ruth Harker), Michelle Choi-Lee (Agent Browning), Dakota Daulby (Agent Fisk), and Nicolas Cage (Longlegs)
Director: Osgood Perkins

Let’s get this out of the way: Osgood Perkins doesn’t make movies for you, me, or anyone who likes a coherent narrative. No, no, this man makes films specifically designed for TikTokers in turtlenecks and YouTubers with ominous video thumbnails reading “ENDING EXPLAINED (You Missed This Detail!)!” in bold red font.

And you know why? Because Mr Perkins himself admitted he cares more about atmosphere than details or logic. The man’s practically allergic to exposition.

Hence, Longlegs isn’t about making sense. It’s about letting you feel smugly clever for untangling a Satanic mood piece held together with vibes and unspoken trauma. You don’t watch this movie. No, you endure it and then sprint to Reddit to compare theories with people with usernames like SatanicCerealBowl666.

Here, Maika Monroe stars as Lee Harker, an FBI agent whose entire performance can be summed up as “resting haunted face”. She’s on the trail of a Satanic serial killer named Longlegs (Nicolas Cage, doing his best cosplay of a deranged Wednesday Addams aunt), who’s been causing dads to murder their families for decades.

Meanwhile, Alicia Witt plays Ruth, Lee’s mom, whose job is to look increasingly deranged in a series of wide-eyed, post-breakdown stares, while carrying creepy dolls like she’s auditioning for The Conjuring: Midwest Edition.

Plot? Sure, there’s technically one. Something about demon orbs, Satanic dolls, coded murder notes, and a string of nine-year-old girls born on the 14th being killed as part of some half-baked occult ritual that’s never properly explained because, you see, atmosphere.

Hence, there are many nonsensical stuff to notice when the brain is on:

• The FBI, despite knowing that nine-year-old girls born on the 14th are the prime targets, keep throwing them birthday parties mid-investigation. Like, what’s next, a casual barbecue during a zombie outbreak?
• Ruth has apparently been planting cursed murder dolls in people’s homes for 20 years, and no one notices. No neighbors? No CCTV? Not one suspicious Amazon review?
• Lee’s psychic abilities work on a strict plot-convenient basis. Can sense a ghost girl across town but can’t tell her mom is a Satanic mailwoman for demonic trinkets.
• Longlegs, a supposedly omnipotent Satanic entity, relies on possessed suburban dads and voodoo Barbies to do his killing. If you’ve got supernatural powers and can manifest on command, maybe cut out the middleman.
• Lee, knowing there’s a cursed doll she needs to destroy, wastes all her bullets shooting people before trying to destroy the doll. Girl, this isn’t amateur hour — save a bullet for the demon plushie.
• The FBI, allegedly the top investigative body in the country, somehow treats a 20-year string of identical ritual murders as isolated incidents. I’ve seen neighborhood watch groups that track threats better than these guys.
• Longlegs’s motivations? Who knows. Soul-harvesting? Psychic kid torture? Just really hates moms? The film flirts with all of it and commits to none, like an occult Tinder date with commitment issues.

Longlegs works if you’re watching it drunk at 1AM with the sound design cranked and no expectation of plot coherence. The moment you start thinking about who did what, when, and why — the whole thing collapses like a Jenga tower made of occult doll heads.

Yet, if you complain about the lack of answers, someone on Letterboxd will call you a philistine, and that is by design all along. If horror fans didn’t spend 12-minute YouTube videos explaining movies that intentionally don’t explain themselves, half of indie horror would lose its marketing strategy.

TL; DR: Osgood Perkins built a pretty, moody, Satanic Rorschach test and left you to figure out what you’re seeing.