Longlegs, dir. Osgood Perkins

On paper this horror film is promising. Writer-director Osgod Perkins is the son of Anthony, the actor who played Norman Bates in Hitchcock's classic Psycho. Maika Monroe is a bona-fide scream queen. Combine this sort of pedigree with Nicolas Cage himself as the titular serial killer, and we're off to the races, surely!

The film's opening scenes is a terrifying, heady, psychedelic onslaught. It is visually and aurally disorienting, both immediately establishing a sense of time and place. We are in Clinton-era USA, trapped in overcast and damp Oregonian suburbs. Maika Monroe plays Lee, a fledging FBI agent assigned to a series of murders – actually closed-door massacres of entire families – spanning decades, with no forensic evidence left behind, save for ciphered letters whose code remains unbroken, each eerily signed off with "Longlegs".

The test that the FBI administers which reveals her clairvoyant abilities is vintage 90s VHS horror, and is not the only horror film technique/trope that Perkins hurls at us.

Sadly, this film fails to capitalise on its hallucinatory, anxiety-ridden opening. It quickly stirs in occult elements and a strained mother-daughter relationship into its police procedural, but the frothing boil it plunges us into at the start cools into a plodding cinematic soup. Two different Gen Alphas in my cinema screening whispered audibly (past the halfway mark) to their friend that this film was excruciatingly slow-paced. This is a fact (not opinion) which this millennial corroborates.

And this film is not a whodunit. (Nicolas Cage, whose production house worked on this film, is prominently credited in the opening credits as Longlegs.) It is a howdunit and whydunit. Lazily, Perkins relies on a late infodump (masquerading as a creepy bedtime story told to a young girl by her mother) that merely reveals what the audience saw coming miles away.

Nicolas Cage as a occultist serial killer, on paper, sounds unmissbly awesome. But the script doesn't give him much to work with, and Cage ends up hammily overplaying a creepy clown instead of being truly freaky. (The telltale sign is Cage's reliance on screaming to portray chaotic evil.) Under prosthetics and bleached-blonde locks, he resembles Marilyn Manson, and is dressed like a budget Heath Ledger Joker Halloween costume. It is as unconvincing as it sounds.

This is the first horror film to my memory that uses the stereotypical techniques of the genre – excessive gore, body mutilation, all-too-human life-sized dolls of children, discordant soundtrack, jump scares, abrupt cuts – to distract from its simplistic and rather unoriginal plotting.

Longlegs liberally borrows from the first season of HBO's True Detective, David Fincher's Mindhunter, and analog horror stylings, but never fully excels in any of the above, nor finds a way to innovately synthesize them. I left the cinema disappointed and confused by the copious praise given the film... as well as why the serial killer calls himself Longlegs. That, sadly, is never explained at all.

P.S. the director was indeed asked about the name Longlegs. And his answer only solidifies my opinion of his film, stylistically cool at the start, but hollow inside, just like the dolls we see in Longlegs.