I saw the first trailer for this movie and purposefully avoided any other reviews or spoilers, which was difficult, as this seems to be all that Film Twitter is talking about. The idea of the trailer — someone is turning children into people who their parents can’t recognize and need to kill — was intriguing.

So if you want to go into this like I did, spoiler free, stop reading now. I won’t be mad.

FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is able to find a suspect’s home without any other evidence. This leads to her being tested for psychic abilities and she’s able to divine the truth about half the time, which come to think of it, is a batting average that would get you into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Her superior officer,  Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) assigns her to his most puzzling case. A series of murder suicides have been happening for more than a decade. In each case, the father kills the wife and children and then kills himself. Family annihilators aren’t new. What is is that each crime scene has a letter in code from someone named Longlegs. This handwriting doesn’t match any victim yet there is no evidence that another person was ever in the home.

Each father also had a nine-year-old daughter born on the fourteenth of the month. The murders happened within six days before or after the birthday and form a sigil when laid out on a calendar with only one date missing to finish this occult shape.

The only survivor of Longlegs is Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka) and she’s been in a mental home, silent for years. She recognizes Harker and gives her a clue to find her doll, which was an exact duplicate of her at nine along with a metal brain inside that the coroner claims had the voice of his ex-wife.

At this point, the FBI should realize that the killer — who has been sending letters to Harker and even broken into her home once, giving her the clues she needs to decode his language — knows too much about Harker, who already seems brittle and unable to deal with the case. They keep her on, even when they learn that her mother called the police about a man matching the look of Longlegs years ago and that Harker has a Polaroid of the man, which they use to soon arrest him.

Alright: I have to break from the narrative for a second and ask some questions.

Code and cyphers are cool. See Zodiac. See Se7en. See the real life Zodiac Killer.

However, the coded language in this movie is never really referred to again after Harker learns how to decode it. It never breaks anything in the case. It’s just cool.

Polaroids are cool, too. After years of pro wrestlers and strippers being the only ones to use them, they suddenly show up in a plenty of art and movies.

One Polaroid image of a man’s face is in no way enough evidence to find someone — they literally find Longlegs in seconds — much less enough physical evidence to keep him as long as they do.

And anyways, you should probably know that Longlegs is Nicholas Cage and his performance is wonderful but breaks the movie because other than the cinematography, nothing in it is as good as his over the top Tiny Tim in Blood Harvest acting. Then you wonder, why is the killer into T. Rex? Why does he make these dolls, which trust me, is the longest con ever. You have to get a creepy life-sized doll of a girl that looks exactly like her into the home and then have them play with it and then hope that she has a father, as well as being born on the ninth. It’s almost too much work until you get to the reveal.

Ah, the reveal.

Despite being a police procedural up until now, Longlegs has lived in Harker’s mother’s (Alicia Witt) basement and that he’s made her the accomplice, a nun who has never been mentioned in any of the police reports until the third act just lets you know that they make these metal-brained evil American Girl dolls with Satanic magic energy. I have to quote my friend Kris, who said, “Imagine if you watched all of Silence of the Lambs and you learn that Clarice’s mom used to bang it out with Hannibal Lecter.”

All of the metal brains seems Showtime Twin Peaks except that I expect that kind of thing from David Lynch and Twin Peaks is the epitome of horror police procedural and when it makes no sense at all, you demand that from it.

Now imagine investing time into a story and then you get a rug pull like this.

Anyways, in case you didn’t guess when you saw that Harker’s boss has a nine-year-old, you can see where this all ends up. You might think that one of the highest rated FBI agents in the country who has been working on a case for years about a man that kills girls age nine on the fourteenth of the month might have the deductive reasoning skills to figure that perhaps inviting an agent connected to his case is a bad idea, not to mention that maybe — just maybe — he and his family would be targeted.

Whoever did Neon’s marketing for this movie, creating the thebirthdaymurders.net website, the trailers, the 458-666-HELL phone number, the posters, it’s all great. Director Oz Perkins told IndieWire that NEON “really responded strongly to the movie, the raw materials of the movie really excited them, the way it looks, the way it feels, the way it sounds. They asked me early on, ‘Do we have your permission to kind of go nuts?’ And I said, ‘What else are we doing here? Go for it. Do your thing.””

The movie that they’re selling you is artifice. The outside of it looks so pretty, with long shots and takes that go on like a movie from another era, but then you’re reminded that it’s 2024 and most modern horror never sticks the landing. It’s not bad but isn’t it worse to believe that something could be great and it’s just average instead of figuring it’s average and not being disappointed?

For a movie that has been called the Silence of the Lambs for the 2020s, this has none of the actual story that backed up that film. The plot unravels as the holes become apparent with just a moment’s thought. As for the comparisons to Fincher, his iron grip of control and must be perfect realism wouldn’t have the 2007 version of The Price Is Right song play in a movie set in the 90s. Then again, Oregon rarely has lightning and thunder and that looks cool, so it’s in the movie.

I saw this at an Alamo Drafthouse and got trailers for Happy Birthday to Me and Brotherhood of Satan which put me in the headspace that I just might get a movie that I would like. But I’m just left with questions in this one and not the good kind of questions that intrigued me and wish I spent more time in the world of the film. I want things to be better and yes, yet again, I got caught up in the hype. You’d think I’d finally learn by now.