Her FBI colleagues describe Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as “highly intuitive”. And if the term sounds like federal agency code for something ominous and slightly sinister, that’s because it is. Harker might lack social graces (she’d sooner lurk alone in her coffin-like, wood-lined cabin than engage in small talk), but she has uncanny instincts when reading a crime scene. Or she does for some of the time, at least – it’s a gift that is selective and intermittent. But as jovial, gregarious Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) observes: “Half-psychic is better than not psychic at all.” Carter is clearly the glass-half-full type, particularly if the glass is half full of whisky. He has recruited Harker to work on a confounding cold case, hoping that her abilities may help to get the investigation moving again. What he couldn’t have anticipated is the fact that her presence acts as a catalyst, luring out the shadowy figure known as Longlegs (a thoroughly chilling Nicolas Cage) – a grotesque, glam rock-obsessed goblin of a man who is implicated in a series of mass murders that span decades.
And so the scene is set for the buzzy latest film from Osgood Perkins (Gretel & Hansel, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House), a grimly atmospheric FBI procedural with occult overtones that has been declared, in some of the more excitable corners of the internet, as the second coming of The Silence of the Lambs. Of course, hype is the kind of spotlight that rarely flatters its subject, and these kinds of comparisons do the film no favours at all. Longlegs is not in the same league as Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece, or for that matter Seven, another frequent comparison. Among other things, the writing – specifically a crude chunk of third-act exposition – lets it down. But still, there is plenty to admire in this oppressively brooding and superbly acted chiller. To paraphrase Carter, perhaps half-great is better than not great at all.
