Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is an FBI agent newly assigned to the investigation of a string of violent deaths. The killings appear to be murder-suicides that wipe out entire families at a time, but there are notes found at each scene, written in a Zodiac-style cipher, and signed "Longlegs." Combined with the brutality and cryptic nature of the crimes, the notes suggest that a single bad actor is at work. As soon as Harker gets involved, the agency begins to make breaks in the case, either through sheer luck or something more sinister.

It's nice to come into a horror movie with no particular expectations and a fresh eye. This emphatically did not happen for me with Longlegs! We can set aside the exuberant marketing campaign by Neon; the movie marketed itself to me by virtue of its writer/director, Oz Perkins. Perkins' debut feature, The Blackcoat's Daughter struck a beautiful and unusual balance. It features an elegantly crafted atmosphere that's oppressive and melancholy, while delivering just enough lurid shocks and invoking just enough traditional tropes to situate itself firmly in the genre.

The dilemma The Blackcoat's Daughter poses is that I always want to talk about it, and yet I don't want to say too much about it, because it's still rather unknown and there are particular pleasures tied to seeing it without knowing too much about the kind of movie you're watching. To fully explain why it's so satisfying to me, I would have to spell out certain games it plays with a viewer's expectations and spoil those games for the listener.

What's amusing about Longlegs is that, in spite of the marketing pushing toward a "You can't imagine what this will be like!" vibe, you absolutely can imagine what it will be like. It is simply not possible, thirty years after Silence of the Lambs drove studios into a frenzied quest for "more unique" serial killers, to win that game. (I'll grant that Se7en won, and it's interesting to think about how it was done, but it didn't blaze a trail anyone else could follow.) Longlegs has to be familiar.

So Perkins barrages the audience with familiarity. He recapitulates many of the major beats of Lambs in the first few scenes. Within minutes, our heroine is frantically stalking through the rooms of a house with her gun outstretched. It took Clarice almost two hours to get there in Lambs. I felt prodded to wonder, "Where can the movie possibly go from here?" Before we know it, Lee Harker is kneeling on the floor, shuffling crime scene photos and other case materials into an impressive pattern on the floor. Before we know it, she's meeting her supervisor's family in a context which makes it utterly clear that they will be in peril before the movie ends. And then, Harker is being stalked at her lonely home. And then, the cypher is cracked! This barrage could be tedious for some viewers (and clearly has been!) but for someone like my son, who loves lore, this degree of lore density in a tight space is a lark.

None of the elements is remotely fresh. We use "derivative" as a pejorative, but in math a derivative has its own distinct shape and curve. The movie is briskly paced and the disparate elements are brought together by a chilly aesthetic drawing on the lensing of cinematographer Andres Arochi (a director in his own right under the name Andres Arochi Tinajero) and a gratifyingly discordant score by a mysterious artist known only as Zilgi (could it be a pseudonym for Elvis Perkins?). The elements don't flow together in a logical way, but they're given a flow by the movie's intentionality. For a while, the movie expertly sets up a nested series of revelations: here's a door. Would you like to see what's on the other side? No? Well, what's on the other side is indeed awful. Here, just a moment, let me show you... [a few minutes later] Here's a box. Shall we open it?

I was frustrated by the spareness of the movie's ending. It's inevitably frustrating when a film like this, which is fueled by the dread of the unknown, has to spell things out. Some details get belabored in a way that makes them seem bizarre. Other questions that I badly wanted answered were not answered. (Angel Heart is one of the first movies I can remember where I felt like "Ah, that was just right!" Highly recommended.) However, when I think about the journey, and not the destination, I still remember Longlegs with a lot of pleasure. I saw it with my son, who pronounced the ultimate blessing — "It was scary" — before he took off.

The movie spends a little time using language from the Book of Revelation to give us some of that old-time The Omen vibe, but the book of the Bible it most resembles is the Gospel of Mark. Mark is distinguished by the crudeness of its narrative; English translations tend to smooth out what is really a very rough Greek text, reading like something scrawled in great haste. The reader is rushed from one incident to another with "And then—" conjunctions. Jesus does a lot of deeds but rarely gives teachings. And the ending is vastly unsatisfying. The monks who copied Mark for later generations were so frustrated with the lack of an ending that they synthesized several alternate endings. But most scholars agree that either the original ending was lost or Mark deliberately ended on the incredible verse: "And they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid."

A story of good news that ends in silence and terror. Longlegs is less of a paradox. The bad news according to Oz.