In its opening weekend, “Longlegs,” a breakout horror film effectively masquerading itself as a throwback police procedural, broke box office records for its distributor NEON. Using a largely memetic marketing campaign, it has followed in the footsteps of other recent horror flicks, presenting itself as the second coming of “The Exorcist” to a younger audience for whom the horror genre begins and ends with whatever A24 has released this year. So, is its success a fad? 

Well, with regard to maintaining a pervasive and discomfiting sense of dread through much of its runtime, “Longlegs” proves without peer among its contemporaries. But when the final act comes, and all its byzantine mythology must be made plain to the audience, it falls apart in a strangely poetic way. At the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic “Psycho,” viewers in that time were met with a lengthy exposition dump as a psychiatrist exhaustively cataloged the titular killer’s pathology. All the film’s tension and suspense melted away while the mystery surrounding Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) was directly spelled out.

Sixty years ago, mainstream audiences were not ready for the complex psychology at the film’s heart and needed their hands held lest they walk out of that auditorium bewildered for life. But “Longlegs,” written and directed by Anthony Perkins’ son Osgood, similarly pivots at the last minute to coddling an audience who, unlike the stuffy conservatives Hitchcock traumatized all those years ago, are more than game to put two and two together.

“Longlegs” opens with one of the strongest prologues in recent memory. Using a more confined, boxy aspect ratio, the film’s introductory sequence introduces us to Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), the pasty, androgynous, aging glam rock enthusiast at the heart of the film’s series of peculiar murders. Seen from the perspective of an unnamed little girl, Longlegs’ dusty, white appearance blends into the snowy environment and conjures a palpable fear. His lumbering frame, from the low height of a child, feels otherworldly and frightening, growing only more so when he hunches his body down to her level. For a nearly imperceptible flash, we see a glimpse of his face before a dramatic cut to the title sequence. 

That abstract terror permeates the quieter, more staid proceedings that follow. Jumping forward 20 years to 1993, we’re introduced to Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a junior FBI agent. Harker possesses preternatural levels of intuition presented as a middle point between potential clairvoyance (should this film devolve into some measure of science fiction) and autistic-coded pattern recognition (far likelier). Her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), conscripts her into aiding on the long-unsolved “Longlegs” case. Over multiple decades, families are annihilated in unexplainable murder-suicides, where someone leaves letters with coded word puzzles signed only “Longlegs.” But it’s the families themselves combusting inward with bloodshed and torture, so how can an external entity be the culprit?

The investigation and its cinematic execution owe a lot to Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs,” with Monroe’s Harker channeling Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling and Underwood’s Carter capturing a variation of Scott Glenn’s Jack Crawford (later played by Laurence Fishburne on the “Hannibal” television series). It’s easy to get caught up in the plaintive, patient way Perkins lets the narrative unfold. The camera holds carefully on these inviting wide shots where the periphery of the frame feels like an omnipresent threat. While Harker labors over crime scene photos, it constantly feels like the darkness of the case will swallow her whole or that something sinister is lurking from right beyond the reach of her gaze.

Perkins establishes this sense of inevitability as a slow burn, that the moody thriller we’re trudging through is going to collide with the occult-y horror picture Cage’s satanic figure shepherds along. But once the two halves meet, the film falls apart. Up to the final act, the film largely fixates on its mood and its dark energy. There are ideas at play around Satanist iconography, our nation’s history with serial killers, and the omnipresent sense that malice lurks behind the doors of even the most milquetoast, suburban dwellings. But the longer it all unravels, the less it feels likely to be building to a satisfying climax. 

When the film takes a left turn and does try to brute-force a killer ending, it flies in the face of all that’s come before it. The film’s die-hard fans and eagle-eyed Redditors will suggest that repeat viewings and slavish attention to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it easter eggs will reveal an ornate tapestry destined to withstand the test of time. (Perhaps they’re even right!)

But on the first watch, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that we’re watching both a celebratory coming-out party for Perkins as a director and empirical proof that his screenwriting requires more polish. Visually, he paints a compelling and engrossing picture, but the script that supports it has all the characteristics of a term paper rushed the night before a deadline. In another world, another rewrite or two might have brought the film’s many third-act revelations in line with the picture that precedes them.

Instead, we’re left with an intriguing effort with some solid performances from its cast that fails to end in a manner befitting its auspicious beginning.

“Longlegs” is currently playing exclusively in theaters.

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So yeah, “Black Panther” is officially about, well, the Black Panther. And yeah, Killmonger, and M’Baku, and W’Kabi and are all great and compelling. But the real shining stars of the movie are the women: strong and smart Nakia, quick and deadly Okoye, and innovative, witty Shuri.

It’s because of this that Brittany Oliver, founding director of the advocacy group Not Without Black Women (NWBW), felt like she had to put together an event to talk about the blockbuster film. Black Panther: Bringing the Spirit of Wakanda Talk Back, will be held March 3 from 5:30-9:30 p.m. at Cheat Day Bar & Grill (737 Carroll St., [443] 708-0929, cheatdaybarandgrill.com). Panelists will include Oliver, community health activist and Morgan State University professor Lawrence Brown, Nnamdi Lumumba of the Ujima People’s Progress Party, and professor Natasha Pratt Harris, Associate Professor and Program Coordinator at Morgan State University’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice. Community advocate and NWBW leader Charlene Rock-Foster will facilitate.

“I think that ‘Black Panther’ has provided an opportunity for various black communities all across the nation to have really important conversations about what it means to be black in America,” Oliver says.

“Originally we were not [having an event] but because of the response that we were getting from the community, they wanted us to have a talkback because Not Without Black Women brings a certain type of perspective when it comes to black radical politics.”

She says that it’s important to talk about the part women play in the story, and what that means for real women in real life.

Some of the topics to be discussed: the importance of black women’s roles both in reality and in the film, the lessons to be learned from “Black Panther” that can shape and influence black politics, and how entertainment influences our youth and communities.

Oliver is hopeful that by discussing these issues, we can bring a little bit of Wakanda to reality.

“Black women should be uplifted in these roles in this way,” she says. “And so I think that ‘Black Panther’ shows the power of when women are uplifted and placed at the center.” 

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If you missed the blessing that was AMC theaters screening Jordan Peele’s social thriller for free on President’s Day, you can still see it again on the big screen today—which is especially useful considering folks (The Golden Globes) who misinterpreted “Get Out” as a comedy apparently need a careful rewatch. Because really, it’s more “a documentary,” as the director tweeted. That “Get Out” opened last year and has already earned a spot in The Charles’ Revival Series speaks volumes to its deserved status as an instantly iconic film, and moreover a resonant indictment of white liberalism. See it tonight ahead of the Oscars next week, when it may or may not be awarded Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and/or Best Original Screenplay. By the way, look out next week for The Beat’s Fake Oscars issue, in which we’ll award the true movie winners this year—because as we all know, more often than not, there’s no justice in the Academy. Feb. 22, 9 p.m., The Charles Theatre, 1711 N. Charles St., (410) 727-3464, thecharles.com, $11.

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Ann Marie Fleming’s blushing hand-drawn feature “Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming” finds the titular character, a 20-something Canadian fast food clerk, on an unexpected trip to her absent father’s homeland of Iran to perform at a poetry festival in Shiraz. Rosie (voiced by Sandra Oh, also an executive producer) would rather make her debut in Paris, home of her idols Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Her self-published collection, “My Eye Full, Poems by a Person Who Has Never Been to France,” is an ode to the land that she romanticizes as the pinnacle of culture.

Rosie is disconnected from her Eastern roots—her father left the family to return to Iran when she was young, and her Chinese mother died shortly after. Raised by her protective maternal grandparents, she has barely left her hometown and inherited an affinity for Western art from her fellow Francophile grandmother.

Unlike her more detailed counterparts, Rosie is rendered as little more than a stick figure with a pink triangle for a skirt (soon to be covered up by a traditional Iranian chador) and two slants for eyes, a go-to avatar Fleming uses elsewhere (she too is Canadian and partly of Chinese descent). Embodied as a reductive representation of both women and Asian people, Rosie’s infinitely more dynamic character challenges the caricature imposed upon her; at the same time, the sparing presentation suggests a person not yet fully developed, simple but unfinished.

Though her naivete introduces her to a series of embarrassments and cultural gaffes, Rosie’s humility and limited exposure to non-Western culture work in her favor, to an extent. She is more open and therefore adaptable than another visiting festival performer, a perpetually-scoffing German literary mansplainer who collapses when his non-Western audience finds his consumer-critical poem distasteful for its depiction of women dining with dogs.

But though she’s no more informed of the real story behind her father’s disappearance than she is of his homeland, Rosie’s open-mindedness does not lend itself so much to entertaining the possibility that her father was not simply a neglectful man who abandoned his family. To Rosie, he is a spectre easier to bitterly reject than to understand; reconstructing that part of her personal narrative is a bigger hurdle than expanding her aesthetic vocabulary.

Rosie quickly learns that Shiraz is as much a poetry capital as Paris, if not more so—Shiraz is the capital of the Fars Province, the origin of the Farsi language and the birthplace of the legendary poets Hafez and Saadi. The people of Shiraz carry the words of their city’s poets as if they were part of their everyday lexicon. Poetry is alive here, and while Rosie learns about the lives and work of the powerful men who authored it, she also becomes aware of the underrecognized influence of women along the way.

Beyond a coming-of-age tale, “Window Horses” serves as an intro to Iranian history and poetry, with about a dozen guest animators taking turns to illustrate different dives into the country’s past and literary figures, as well as pieces performed by the festival’s featured writers. The shifts in the film’s visual language are distinct yet cohesive, maintaining a kind of fluorescent buzz beneath a collage of rich textures and borrowing jewel-like details from Persian miniature paintings (which were influenced by Chinese art, so an apt example of cultural intersectionality here). One highlight: Guest artist Bahram Javaheri animates the mythic biography of the poet Hafez (who, as Rosie notes while others too quickly overlook, fucked over his wife in the process of becoming a great big important poetry man by keeping a mistress his muse) as a quasi-3D wall carving in motion with embellishments culled from illuminated manuscripts—the result is decadent.

By bringing on a range of artists to reinterpret poetry and history, Fleming mirrors the exchanges her own heroine undertakes when she attempts to translate a poem given to her by a fellow performer, a Chinese expat who enlightens Rosie with pieces of history from her mother’s country. He titles his poem with a flexible Mandarin word meaning “horse, mother . . . a bridge from one world to another,” piquing the interest of his horse-fixated, motherless, wanderlusting new friend. Unable to read Mandarin, Rosie visits a bookstore in Shiraz seeking a Mandarin-English dictionary, but leaves instead with Mandarin-Farsi and English-Farsi dictionaries.

What begins as a meticulous process of translating the poet’s words from Chinese to Farsi and then from Farsi to English becomes a creative pursuit of Rosie’s own, revealing the spaces between cultural non-parallels where bravery like hers is particularly useful. She does not merely take artistic liberties; she fills the gaps understood to divide civilizations with her own identity, where those histories and the words that shape them overlap, and letting it take new form.

“Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming,” directed by Ann Marie Fleming, screens at the Creative Alliance on Jan. 11.

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