Horrors movies have the advantage of usually being short and easy to watch but I find myself liking them less and less. This one has decent reviews and once again stars Nicolas Cage who seemingly will appear in any schlocky project these days. It’s decently put together and has strong vibes but that’s all it has. Not only is it a mishmash of the usual tropes: scary clown-like figure, Satanic cults, dolls and so on, it makes no attempt whatsoever at verisimilitude. The frustrating thing is that at times it’s reminiscent of David Fincher’s style but in the end it’s not a serious film at all.
Lee Harker is a young FBI agent who proves to be a psychic when she successfully identifies the house the suspect is hiding in on a hunch. She is assigned by her supervisor William Harker to work on a series of murder-suicides that has remained unsolved for 30 years. In each case, the father of the family seemingly kills everyone before committing suicide and there is a cryptic message left behind signed by Longlegs. Lee realizes that each family has a 9-year-old daughter born on the 14th day of the month and the combined dates form a triangle on a calendar. One night at home, Lee is on a call with her mother when then she notices someone lurking nearby. Then she finds another message signed by Longlegs. Lee and William revisit the site of one of the earliest cases and find a strange doll buried in a barn. They visit a girl who was the sole survivor of that attack and learns that just one day previously another visitor had arrived, signing in as Lee Harker.
Switching back and forth between the 1990s and the 1970s, this certainly projects the right horror vibes. It even fakes period appropriate film grain to get the look down and Nicolas Cage in his white suit, face paint and crazed expression is just the right kind of creepy. Add in the coded messages with a Satanic theme, dolls which are seemingly able to exert a mind control effect, and you might think you have the makings of a solid horror film. Except it’s not because none of these elements link together in any meaningful way and were presumably included only because they fit the overall vibes. Decrypting the messages or finding the birthdate connections between the victim mean nothing at all. The killer has no motivation other than that he worships the Devil. That Lee herself is intimately connected to the case is telegraphed so obviously from the beginning that her supervisor must be an idiot for even assigning her to it. This not an investigative film at all as the clues mean nothing and you’re supposed to just roll with it and not overthink things.
That’s because if you don’t turn your brain off, there’s so much about this that is just wrong and dumb. When Lee sits down for briefings, we see a roomful of agents, which is about what we might expect when dealing with a serial killer case. Yet when it’s time to actually do anything, it’s just her and maybe one other agent. What is everyone else doing? Why do Lee and William have to revisit an old crime scene at night? Why isn’t Lee surrounded by constant security the moment the FBI realizes she’s personally connected to the case. Like so many horror films, it depicts a patently implausible, unrealistic world and wants us to willfully play along and suspend our disbelief because that’s how the genre works. It’s like those haunted houses in theme parks. We know it’s all fake animatronics, paid actors and recordings of spooky sounds and we’re expected to pretend to be scared. Maybe if they’d bothered to build up a real mythos or put more serious effort into making the story coherent, I might have bothered to care but no, this is just stupidity all the way down.
The really frustrating thing is that the visuals and the production quality are strong enough that I can’t just dismiss this out of hand. It feels like any moment now, it could be good. But it never does so you shouldn’t watch it.