Nicolas Cage’s Performance in Longlegs Shows the Reality of Serial Killers

Nicolas Cage’s performance in Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs has drawn many different reactions. Some found it overbearing or too comedic. Others saw it as unnervingly memorable. And some were disappointed there wasn’t more to it. Whatever way you look at it, it’s undeniably a Nicolas Cage performance. Perhaps one that best defines what that means.

The pre-release hype about the beloved actor playing a weirdo serial killer was bound to bring certain expectations. The public perception of what a Nicolas Cage performance is has shifted into a twisted caricature that often forgets the man is just as great at doing the understated and dark as he is the manic and silly. His showing as Longlegs is probably the best showcase for some time.

Despite a reputation for hamming it up, Cage is all about performance art. He has a distinct style that eschews the conveyor belt of pensive surliness or quiptastic bravado that constitutes a celebrated performance in modern cinema. In the quirks, you find the subtleties. The way he shapes and manipulates his particular mannerisms and acting style in minute ways is undervalued because he doesn’t always pick the flavor of the month project to showcase that.

Longlegs gives him the space to do that. With relatively little screen time, he creates a character who makes an impact in unexpected ways. It’s a high-profile movie with arthouse sensibilities, which feels like the perfect place for Cage.

Cage puts on his Longlegs

It could have been very easy to milk the idea of Nicolas Cage as an eccentric serial killer, putting him front and center of everything for the duration and having him go wild like public perception would have you expect.

Instead, Perkins and Cage rein it in. Longlegs appears infrequently, often out of focus or obscured, and largely arrives without ceremony. Even in glimpses, there’s an unpleasant, pathetic demeanor to Longlegs that doesn’t dispel the notion he’s dangerous, but implies his aura is greater than the man behind it. Still, after everything plays out, you realize just how smoke and mirrors the persona of Longlegs was and how well Cage put that across in small ways.

Perkins and Cage bait the hook for the viewer, building Longlegs to be this decade’s Hannibal Lecter. But he’s merely a vessel, grandstanding under the banner of something greater. Longlegs is the reality of serial killers. The allure and morbid fascination surrounding them is unwarranted and at odds with the people behind the persona.

Cage plays Longlegs like a horrid loser weirdo who has been given the belief he’s some all-powerful being. His dangerous delusion is so powerful that it becomes a confidence and aura. Inside the same performance, you have two people: Longlegs, the satanic mastermind of a serial killer plot, and the unpleasant, aggravating man with a gratingly gleeful falsetto and a face that looks like it’s quite familiar with being smashed into metal tables. They overlap in ways that are both goofy and unsettling. Look at that sequence where he takes a trip to the local store. There he has his schtick rebuffed by an annoyed young girl. Elements of the pathetic man behind the dread-inducing myth come through, and the effect is to repulse and unnerve in equal measure. Something that Cage clearly succeeds at.