A chilling, half-remembered encounter from childhood looms over Longlegs, Osgood Perkins’ stylishly composed 1990s-set horror film about a young FBI agent (Maika Monroe) whose past seems to hold a key to a decades-long serial killer suburban spree.

In the opening flashback scene of Longlegs, a young girl walks out of her house to meet a stranger on her snow-covered yard. We never see more than the bottom half of his face, but the sense of creepiness is overwhelming. The image, with a scream, cuts out before Longlegs properly gets underway.

Twenty five years later, that girl (Monroe’s Lee Harker) is now grown and brought into the investigation. She’s preternaturally good at decoding the serial killer’s choreographed targets, but her psychological astuteness has a blind spot. In Osgood’s gripping if trite horror film about an elusive boogeyman, the most unnerving mystery is the foggy, fractured nature of childhood memory.

Longlegs arrived on its own wave of mystery thanks to a lengthy, enigmatic marketing campaign.

Is the buzz warranted? That may depend on your tolerance for a very serious procedural that’s extremely adept at building an ominous slow burn yet nevertheless leads to a pile-up of horror tropes: satanic worship, scary dolls and an outlandish Nicolas Cage.

It’s a credit to the harrowingly spell-binding first half of Longlegs – and to Monroe – that the film’s third act disappoints. After that prologue – presented in a boxy ratio with rounded edges, as if seen through an overhead projector – the screen widens.

-- Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin