It states its intentions right away. The first minutes of surely the scariest movie you’ll see this year – involve a rural road, a station wagon, and a little girl who encounters an unexpected man in her front yard. The sequence is eerie and then, all at once, it’s terrifying – and represents only the first of the jolts and shocks to come.
That little girl will grow up to be Lee Harker, an FBI agent played with mesmerising control by Maika Monroe, whom you may barely recognise here. (The man in her yard is Nicolas Cage, and you won’t recognise him.) It’s not that it’s a surprise to see Monroe in a horror film – the best movies on her resumé are all that (or close): , but she’s usually cast to type: pretty, blonde, all-American.
Here, Monroe is a haunted, highly disciplined, intuitive weirdo; an investigator trying to solve a set of serial murders, very much in the mould of Clarice Starling from , a movie this one emulates. Cage, beneath prosthetics and make-up, is the movie’s monster – a satan-worshiping doll-maker – but he doesn’t carry this movie scene to scene. That’s Monroe, playing an enigma who spooks as much as she’s spooked.
“I had to kind of tap into something different for this one,” she admits. She also had to fight for the part. It’s a charmingly self-effacing story she’s been telling in interviews lately: “I read the script and was completely obsessed.
And then I met Os,” she says, referring to the movie’s talented wr.
