Mama, we're all crazee now: "Longlegs"

Longlegs' box-office success comes as a surprise for at least two reasons. Firstly, from a distance - and, in fact, fairly close-up - it has the look of yet more of that VOD-bound serial-killer filler Nicolas Cage has been addending of late to his bran tub of a CV. Secondly, this is a horror film that intends to be horrific, offering none of the playful winking and gleeful splatter of the recent Abigail; its insistent coolness of tone serves as a contrast to the overt emotionality of A Quiet Place: Day One. (One reason for American horror cinema's current commercial hot streak may be that its creatives have figured out what's gone missing from the multiplex in recent decades: the element of choice.) We're transported back to the Clinton years - some time post-Silence of the Lambs and pre-Se7en, two likely (and sound) reference points - to observe a cat-and-mouse game between characters who don't quite fit the usual description. Our heroine (Maika Monroe, from It Follows and Watcher) is a hypersensitive young FBI agent classified in the opening reel as part-psychic. Cage's sociopath - who's been taunting his pursuers for thirty years with missives penned in Zodiac-killer code - deploys an unusual MO: turning the patriarchs of innocent families against their own wives and children (and eventually themselves), essentially delegating the butchery. This shift away from procedural norms has two effects. First, it makes us shift uneasily when our gal's boss (Blair Underwood) invites her home early on to meet his wife and child. (Introducing... Chekhov's nuclear family!) Second, it establishes Longlegs as a contender in the field of messing-with-your-head horror, more cerebral than visceral, dependent for its ultimate success on the suggestibility of characters and audience alike. Maybe the crowds have come out for it knowing that, however fucked up things get, they can always sneak into an adjacent screen and have any scattered mind marbles reset by the chiropractic Inside Out 2.

Our mindmangler-in-chief is writer-director Osgood Perkins, son of Anthony, and yes, that must have been some childhood. ("That messes a kid up," the detective is told after confessing her younger self's dreams of becoming an actress.) Perkins Jr. has a real facility with screen space and architecture, immediately setting about conjuring dread from shots seemingly purged of human life: an anonymous suburban retreat, a library corridor, an abandoned farmhouse at twilight. More generally, he opens up his frames by blocking his actors front and centre, as if they were bugs trapped under the glass of the camera: the depths of the frame, with their sudden, shadowy intrusions, equate to the dark recesses of the imagination and the depths of humanity. Who knows what's lurking back there? Some of this is effective, but elsewhere Longlegs betrays a flatness that suggests a jaded soul taking a black marker pen to back editions of Homes & Gardens. The film's strengths are atmospheric rather than narrative: if you were feeling in any way generous, you could call the pacing considered, but this is a frustratingly stop-start investigation that permits its heroine time to go home and unpick her own past family trauma. Here, Longlegs begins to suffer terribly in comparison with the looming memory of the fully dimensional, palpably felt Lambs: where Jonathan Demme and Ted Tally took care to humanise their characters, even making a figure as monstrous as Hannibal Lecter such a franchisable joy to be around, Perkins looks on askance, all too aware of the carnage he has planned.

Monroe gives an especially terse and unhappy sketch of someone messed up beyond easy recognition from the word go; the performance is never allowed to extend past an eternally twitching, clenching jaw. Cage, meanwhile, in what seems likely to prove the most divisive (because ripest) turn of his mid-career renaissance, is busy making a mockery of the plot: not for a single minute do we buy that someone who looks this way (like Jim Morrison pulled from the Thames after thirty years) and acts this way (shouty glam-rock flourishes) would have escaped police attention for the best part of three decades. The trouble with Longlegs is that for all its unsettling ambience, its characters feel like a weird kid's doodles rather than convincingly perishable flesh-and-blood. The reason the teens at my public screening gathered in the foyer afterwards to list the ways in which the film wasn't scary is that none of the deaths in the final half-hour seem to matter; like the killer's familiars, these people are hollow dolls filled with sugar syrup, posed in place and bashed around, and their eventual passing is but the inevitably grim icing on a generally sorry, desperately thin cake. Clearly, in our post-Ari Aster universe, there's a demographic hungry for this type of sour-patch confection - and, crucially, ways of marketing it to them. I'll concede that in its stronger stretches - the first hour in particular - Longlegs is distinctively odd in its depiction of everyday, back-garden American madness. But it proves an awful slog towards a far from rewarding payoff, and a movie that gets monumentally less assured and convincing once Cage's monster is drawn out into the spotlight: here, at the last, is nothing so terrifying as a big old ham who's been let loose on the propbox.

Longlegs is now showing in cinemas nationwide.