LONGLEGS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS???

"The scariest film of the decade". "A must-see". "Stunning". "Terrifying". "Masterpiece". "Masterpiece". "Masterpiece". Five stars, five stars. And I'm sitting there in Row D and thinking: are we watching the same film? In the way that I remember watching The Hangover with friends, on the same sofa in the same room at the same time and struggling to reconcile their laughter with my total lack of it, I'm currently struggling to understand how the rapturous raves fit with the definitely not "the scariest film of the decade" that I watched. Furthermore: in an effort to be scrupulously fair and to make sure I hadn't missed anything, I actually went back and saw it again, last night. And to be brutally honest: I haven't changed my mind at all.

Ah, the voices tell me, but you're a diehard horror enthusiast who's been watching horror movies on a regular basis for forty years now: you're immune to this stuff and your terror threshold is far higher than that of non-nerdy Real People. Nope: for one thing it's not as though I don't still get scared in modern movies sometimes: some of Blumhouse's ongoing Conjuring series and spinoffs have certainly done the job, for example. And for another, it's not like those above laudatory quotes were from My Little Pony Monthly or the review pages of a Cliff Richard fan magazine. They're from sites like Flickering Myth and Dread Central who, I think we can agree, know about horror. If they're getting that scared by Longlegs, why oh why aren't I?

There's certainly nothing wrong with the idea of making (yet) another FBI-vs-serial-killer movie: cinemas and video racks were full of them following on from The Silence Of The Lambs and they're usually a reliably enjoyable genre. It's 1995 (the prime era of The X-Files before it went off the rails) and rookie agent Maika Monroe is either highly intuitive or slightly psychic, so gets quickly assigned to a (surprisingly small) task force investigating a string of mysterious murder-suicides and coded messages left at the crime scenes. The clues, some of which are directed at Monroe specifically, lead to an incident in her own childhood and ultimately to Longlegs himself, a long-haired, whiny-voiced weirdo played by Nicolas Cage in a performance that makes his usual bug-eyed shouty freakouts look like Anthony Hopkins in The Remains Of The Day. But how and why is he doing it? And who's the man downstairs?

By far, by far, the scariest, creepiest, wrongest thing in Longlegs is the man himself. Cage has clearly been directed not just to turn it up to eleven, but to then turn that up to eleven, eleven times. The trouble is not only that, with his baffling choices regarding hair, make-up and apparel that immediately flag him as the most obviously suspicious man in the county (even the clerk in the local grocery recognises him as "that gross guy again"), but it overbalances the film and you're half-wanting Nic Cage to come back on screen and do his bonkers thing again, because there are few things in modern cinema more perversely enjoyable than watching this particular Academy Award winner go so completely off his medication. But that then forces the more interesting part of the film - the plot, the narrative - into the back seat.

But that's because this is very much Un Film De... and the stylistics and visuals of writer/director Oz (Osgood) Perkins just get in the way of the scares. Long, static shots, sometimes from unusual vantage points. Ambient, frequently non-musical music score (the Zilgi credited is actually Perkins' regular composer, his younger brother Elvis). Flipping between 4:3 and full widescreen. Low rumblings on the soundtrack that make it sound like a Transformers movie is bleeding through from the cinema next door. (I checked, it wasn't.) Longlegs isn't primarily a thriller or a horror movie, it's an Osgood Perkins film. And of course there's nothing wrong with that, but not only isn't Longlegs the scariest film of the decade, it's not even the scariest Osgood Perkins film (which I think is probably the splendidly titled I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House, though it is a fairly long time since I saw it).

Maybe I just wanted an exciting, entertaining popcorn potboiler and I got a weird, unsettling Name Director movie instead. It's certainly interesting and it's undeniably creepy and offputting, and there's no question that it conjures up an indefinable mood of dread. But it's not by any measure the scariest film of the decade and it's not by any measure a masterpiece. And having now seen it twice, in cinemas, I really don't get why anyone is saying that it is.

**