Baffled by the near-universal praise. First off, the marketing team at Neon is brilliant. Every teaser, promo, early review gave an impression that THIS was the horror film of the year. I was filled with dread walking into the theater.
Unfortunately, the movie is a lot of half-baked horror cliches propped up by art-house style. A perfect example of modern “elevated horror” done wrong. I wouldn’t mind the “mood over substance” nature of the movie if the mood were at all consistent or fresh. That’s why the first 40 minutes are excellent. All mood, promises, setup, without any of that annoying “development” or “payoff.” This movie pulls from a ton of horror films, most notably Seven, Zodiac, and Silence of the Lambs. And while the movie tries to subvert or expand on the tropes of the serial killer thriller, it only reminded me of better movies I’d rather be watching.
Maybe the most overbearing influence here is late-period Stephen King, whether intentional or not. Harker is more or less King’s Holly character (The Outsider, Mr. Mercedes), a socially awkward detective with psychic abilities. It falls into similar issues those stories sometimes do as well (watch The Outsider on HBO and you’ll see what I mean). Cop shows and procedurals are fun because these characters must use their wits, must follow clues, and have human limitations. When your hero can easily find the location of a killer, just “knows” what a coded message means, we often feel cheated. The more the movie leaned into supernatural horror cliches (evil puppet, devil cults) the more I lost interest.
Perkins’ style will work better on some than others. I found it painfully mannered. Early in the film, after a midnight investigation montage, our hero is shown asleep in the middle of a vast room, beside perfectly organized evil-looking papers. It could’ve been in a Wes Anderson film. At another moment, we see flashbacks to a horrific murder-suicide, but framed and blocked with self-conscious symmetry. Nearly every performance is cold, monotone, and slow. Well, except for one.
That brings me to the Nicolas Cage of it all. I love him. He brings personality to some of the worst movies. Yet here he was as out of place as Paddington in Andrei Rubvlev. As I said before, I was hooked in the first act. But then the movie puts all its cards on the table, shows us Cage in one of his hammiest performances of the last few years, and all that steady, intense dread dissipates in an instant. People in my theater were laughing. Maybe Perkins was trying to contrast the goofiness of Cage with the self-serious tone. But why? Cage sings, whines, laughs like the Joker, does every “creepy” horror cliche in the book, all under laughable beverly-hills-looking plastic surgery makeup. After Cage’s few key scenes, the movie follows the predictable motions of your average Blumhouse vehicle (spooky doll, mommy issues, possession), and never recaptures its early dread. It goes so far toward bad horror trends, that it explains, extensively, the machinations of its simple plot right before the predictable finale.
The movie is far more interested in the vibes of the spooky serial killer, in the aesthetics of his clues, than in how those clues would be meaningful to an FBI agent. The movie has little interest in being a procedural, discarding that element halfway through. This wouldn’t be an issue if we had characters with personality, who we could follow on their horrifying journey. Twin Peaks gives us similarly psychic, supernatural-searching investigators, but that show/movie is tonally consistent, and we can appreciate the stakes of the broader mystery. Because of Perkins’ mannered style, our characters behave in ways that strain credulity (a few moments in the finale had me asking “how are you an FBI agent???”)
I wish I “got” this movie as some other reviewers do, but I found the style overbearing and the content silly. See it for some very very funny Nic Cage moments.