A bright young FBI agent is enlisted by her older male mentor to help investigate a string of unsolved murders. Haunted by past family trauma, this agent delves into a horror that unfolds in gray, leaf-strewn corners of small-town America, moving ever closer to a killer.

If that sounds like an intriguing plot, by all means go watch The Silence of the Lambs. I’m less willing to recommend Longlegs (in theaters July 12), which follows roughly the same plot until it spins off into something far sillier. Lambs is an obvious influence on the film, but Longlegs is also gathering inspiration from Se7en, Hereditary, and other superior chillers. It’s a handsomely sewn patchwork imbued with zero meaning of its own.

Directed by Osgood Perkins, Longlegs unfolds in the early 1990s, an era strikingly rendered in all its drab, boxy banality by cinematographer Andres Arochi and production designer Danny Vermette. The film moves at a slow glide, plunging its hero, FBI agent Lee (Maika Monroe), into an abyss. She has been tasked with looking into a series of family annihilation killings, instances in which a father has killed his wife and children and then himself. These cases are mysteriously linked by notes written in code found at each crime scene. Lee’s boss, Carter (Blair Underwood), is eager to understand the connection—maybe there is a killer out there, somehow convincing these men to do his murdering for him.

This early portion of the film is enveloping, a series of dreadful pictures occasionally interrupted, in frightening fashion, by a thud at the door or a figure darting into frame in the background. Osgood may be mimicking past forms, but he does so with sleek assurance. The effective, discrete moments in the first part of Longlegs—the film is divided into three chapters—promise something grand and terrifying. What is waiting at the end of the film’s dark hallway? What is it, exactly, that’s scratching at the door?

The answers, I’m afraid, tip the film into sloppy incoherence. Satanic worship is involved, as are a host of other tossed-in plot devices that suggest Osgood has been steering blind the whole time. Little in the film’s conclusion adds up or satisfies; it begins to look more and more like a mess of spaghetti, hurled against the wall. Horror movies need not have wholly logical explanations—shivers of ambiguity or contradiction are often appreciated—but Longlegs hurtles past compelling murkiness and lands in the realm of dull nonsense. Worse still, one gets the sense that Osgood is slightly mocking the audience for daring to think something might come out of all of his artful setup.

We should perhaps have known that things were going to get dumb the second we spotted Nicolas Cage, who plays the titular killer under a mess of prosthetics and a stringy wig. Cage can be a fine actor, but he is also a tiresome ham when he wants to be. In Longlegs, he trills and roars, giggles and sings. It’s a pretty antiquated idea of twisted serial killer tics, drowning the elegant iciness of Osgood’s film in cartoonish theatrics.

To be fair to Cage, Osgood certainly encourages this, dragging Cage and Monroe into a final act that isn’t the fun kind of ludicrous. Like so many buzzy but ultimately disappointing genre films, Longlegs seems as though it were made to exist as a series of clipped moments, scattered across the memetic seas of the internet. Cage is just another part of that cynical equation, a ringer employed to ensure some kind of virality.

Maybe, then, the irksome, nyah-nyah poke of the film’s ending is entirely intentional, designed to elicit immediate, visceral reaction from audiences as they rush to their phones on the way out of the theater. Or the whole thing was made earnestly, which might be even more grim. Either way, Longlegs is stylish but vacuous, a prettily foreboding picture with nothing behind it. As Hannibal Lecter might say, it’s a well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste.