Maika Monroe makes fear legible in a guarded posture or a low voice, without making the frightened person seem foolish. We rate her most highly when horror gives that person someone to care about.
Fi1m perspective
In Longlegs (2024), Maika Monroe holds her arms close and speaks barely above a murmur. Her Agent Lee Harker seems to have learnt to take up as little space as possible, even while investigating horrors that demand her attention. Monroe is good at letting fear alter the way a person occupies a room. We value that restraint, especially when the writing lets us see whom the frightened person might trust.
Her breakthrough films, Adam Wingard’s The Guest (2014) and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2015), established her in horror and thrillers. Subsequent work has not been confined to those genres, though Chloe Okuno’s Watcher (2022) continued the run of thrillers before Longlegs. The risk is repetition: we want her to have more to do than register the next threat. It is worth looking closely, though, at how differently Jay Height and Harker respond to fear.
Mitchell gets more from her in It Follows by giving Jay people who care about her. As Jay, pursued after a sexual encounter, Monroe conveys distress without suggesting that the young woman is foolish or merely waiting for the next scare. We were moved by the tenderness between Jay and Keir Gilchrist’s Paul; their care for each other gives us a reason to dread something happening to them. Mitchell lets the young people help one another, and Monroe makes that help matter. The hazy rules occasionally weaken the suspense, but our concern for Jay survives them.
In Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, Harker is harder to approach, and Monroe makes that reserve feel different from Jay’s more open distress. Andres Arochi’s boxed-in frames suit a performance that allows so little physical ease. Monroe helps hold our attention through a horror film worth seeing with reservations, though she cannot prevent its explanations from draining the fear. Start with It Follows, and give the scenes between Jay and Paul as much attention as the approaching danger.
Biography
Maika Monroe is an American actress. Born Dillon Monroe Buckley on 29 May 1993 in Santa Barbara, California, she initially trained as a professional kiteboarder before moving into acting.
She made her film debut in At Any Price (2012) and achieved breakthrough recognition with leading roles in the thriller The Guest and the horror film It Follows (both 2014). Monroe has since appeared in further thrillers and horror films including Greta (2019), Watcher (2022) and Longlegs (2024), in which she played FBI agent Lee Harker. She has also featured in action films such as Independence Day: Resurgence (2016).
