It’s the Clinton era and offices are still earth toned. FBI Agent Lee Harker is stalking the suburbs in search of a middle-aged male suspect who impels fathers to murder their families and then themselves. The handwritten letters he leaves at the scene are the only evidence of his presence, while the only commonality among his victims is that their daughters have birthdays on the 14th of their final month. As she increases the intensity of her investigation, Harker finds herself drawn deeper into previously hidden memories, all centered on the day a stranger came to visit her and her mother’s house.
In his fifth film as director, Oz Perkins transfers the pallid bleakness and grit of 1970s European horror to another overcast, forested, underlit landscape: the state of Oregon. His direction is keenly first-person, with Maika Monroe’s lead performance as integral a part of the movie’s production design as its actual set and costumes. While the occult registers a substantive appearance, the thematic edge of the film is provided by the uncovering of the parts of ourselves that we manage to function only by keeping buried. What we have to fear is what we cannot bear to know. Longlegs eventually over-explains its hand, but the journey to that point is quite successful at unsettling.