Oz Perkins’ Longlegs has been touted as one of the most terrifying horror films of the last year. I have to admit I was just a little bit underwhelmed though. Perkins draws on a strand of horror films that I love, pays homage to them beautifully, and even adds some grace notes of his own, but in many ways Longlegs is a pastiche that (for me) doesn’t quite add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Perkins seems to be drawing upon what might be described as the networked serial killer films of the late 80s and 90s, and Michael Mann’s Manhunter, the first adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter saga, in particular. In Mann’s hands, the serial killer becomes a figure capable of mapping postmodern and proto-digital space, an evolution in human perception that the detective struggles to keep up with. Opening in the mid 90s, Perkins’ film brims with this same sense of informational density – books, libraries, letters, notes, ciphers and patterns all proliferate throughout the narrative and all feel like so many surrogates for nascent digital code. Against that backdrop, fledgling FBI agent Mia Harker, played by Maika Monroe, attempts to track down a serial killer known as Longlegs, played by Nicolas Cage.

In Manhunter and films like it, the digital future was best approximated as a series of pregnant voids. Perkins draws on that aesthetic beautifully, suffusing his mise-en-scenes with luminous blanknesses and silences that swell in the middle of conversations. The opening sequence sets the scene: Mia, as a child, encounters Longlegs on a road near her rural home. However, for the audience, Longlegs’s face remains just out of the frame. From here, the images in the film are often characterised by absences and ellipses as well. Later on, a victim-collaborator of Longlegs describes herself as in a “long dream…a nowhere between here and there,” while Longlegs describes himself as “a little bit of everywhere.” The film seems to exist in the same state of perpetual marginality and liminality, relegating everything we want or need to know to the edges of evocatively evacuated mise-en-scenes. Perkins also shifts subliminally between establishing shots and still photographs, enhancing this odd alternation between presence and absence.

Of course, Longlegs differs from Manhunter in that it is a period piece. The digital future that Mann glimpses has become an everyday banality for us in the 2020s. Perkins injects that precarious futurity back into the narrative by imbuing Mia with a precognitive apprehension of space. She’s not quite psychic but she is able to sense events right before they occur – or more accurately, sense which of the film’s absences are about to become salient before anyone else. She describes this ability, simply, as “looking long enough.” In the opening scene, for example, she and her partner track another serial killer down to a blankly anonymous housing tract, where she is able to intuit the correct house but unable to predict how quickly her partner will be killed. As a result, Mia isn’t at home in any space except those of the near future, which in turn makes the present tense itself somewhat unhomely. Watching the film, you feel every space yearning for its own existence a short period into the future.

Interestingly, this perceptual advantage puts Mia on a par with the serial killer’s own preternatural ability to map space. I think Longlegs was strongest when Perkins embraced the synergy this created between detective and killer. In possibly the best scene of the film we alternate between Mia and Longlegs’ augmented perspectives as he entices her out into the night and makes himself at home in her house. The physical spaces of the present feel genuinely unhomely here.

Up to a point I think the narrative really worked with this spatial scheme. The central premise is really scary – it seems like a serial killer (Longlegs) is inducing otherwise normal men to become family annihilators. Worse, it seems like he is able to do this from a distance. In response, Mia starts to comb back through decades of family annihilation, wondering whether she can reinterpret any of them as acts of serial killing. In late 80s and early 90s film, part of the serial killer’s preternatural perception hinged on an ability to act remotely, and to network from a distance (or feel the nascent network from a distance) and Longlegs’ ability certainly fits this mould. Where I felt the film fell a bit flat was in the way Perkins incorporates the supernatural. Since Mia experiences a certain degree of precognition it makes sense that Longlegs should be endowed with supernatural powers of his own, and these are genuinely scary on their own terms. They revolve around a series of dolls that he manufactures and eventually Mia’s own mother, played in a brilliant piece of casting by Alicia Witt.

Yet while the family annihilation narratives and the supernatural doll narratives are both eerie I didn’t feel that they really came together. It was like Perkins was grasping for a way to make the digital future of the 80s and 90s serial killer film feel exotic again but didn’t quite put the pieces together. It didn’t help either that Nicholas Cage wasn’t all that scary, at least not when he finally reveals himself. True to the spirit of the film he’s terrifying when glimpsed in fragments, or when he’s coterminous with the edges of the screen, or even when he just resonates across empty space. But in person he’s as anticlimactic as his capture – just waiting at a bus stop for the police to apprehend him. Scariness aside though, this is still memorable as one of Cage’s most maximal performances in a while – think Joan Rivers – especially because Perkins (to his credit) uses him fairly minimally. All in all then, a throwback to one of my favourite modes of crime film but it didn’t quite come together as more than the sum of its parts for me.