Director: Oz Perkins

Stars: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Lauren Acala

Writer-director Oz Perkins’ 90s-set horror picture is nicely crafted but buckles under its own portentousness.

Shades of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ as FBI agent Lee Harker (‘scream queen’ Monroe) is assigned to an unsolved case involving a seemingly supernatural serial killer known as Longlegs.

A prologue set in the 70s in which the young Harker (Acala) encounters a chillingly creepy figure just prior to her birthday suggests that she may have personal history with the demonic figure.Harker possesses clairvoyant powers, something casually accepted by her superior officer Agent Carter (Underwood), and evidenced in an early scene when Harker and her partner must go door knocking and she intuitively selects the right house.

As the investigation progresses, a series of recurring motifs, along with notes written in strange symbols, suggests the influence of the occult on the crimes. All the while, Harker is receiving calls from her mother Ruth (Witt) reminding her to pray.

As the socially maladroit Harker, Monroe delivers all of her lines in a stumbling anxious whisper, and there’s an amusingly deadpan scene midway where she meets Carter’s adorable young daughter who invites Harker to her birthday party.

The picture is handsomely mounted, shifting aspect ratios and all, but Andrés Arochi Tinajero’s cinematography, all brown stygian lighting for interiors and wintry greys for exteriors, coupled with the overwrought sense of foreboding, occasionally pushes this into self-parody, an impression compounded by the presence of a typically gurning Nicolas Cage, turning it up to eleven as usual.

Longlegs is released on 12th July

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm