It's rare that I give a film a second chance to win me over, but with writer-director Osgood Perkins' "Longlegs," I'm glad I did, in spite of my harboring some lingering issues with it.

I suspect the promotional campaign for "Longlegs" oversold Nicolas Cage's role to me, since his performance is honestly the weakest, most overdone aspect of this film. His final appearance onscreen did a lot to sour my feelings toward the rest of the film’s proceedings.

My second viewing of "Longlegs" obviously couldn't offer the surprises I experienced the first time around, but it allowed me to properly appreciate the performances of Cage’s costars.

Maika Monroe has proven her cred as a cinematic "scream queen," from 2014's "The Guest" and "It Follows," through 2022's "Watcher" and "Significant Other," so she's a flawless fit for a Jodie Foster-style fledgling FBI agent, in a 1990s period-piece hunt for a ghoulish serial killer.

What makes Monroe's horror heroines so effective is the actress' ability to layer a visibly fearful vulnerability with a stoically fractured resilience. Her understated expressions of emotion convey how haunted she remains from the traumas of unsolved mysteries and undisclosed secrets.

Monroe isn't just playing a Clarice Starling stand-in, though, since Perkins' "Longlegs" borrows not only from 1991's "The Silence of the Lambs," but also from the spookier supernatural escapades of the fictional FBI portrayed by "The X-Files," which also made its debut during the early 1990s.

Unlike Mulder and Scully's sternly skeptical chain of command, Monroe's supervisor in the FBI, played by Blair Underwood, is more receptive to accepting paranormal phenomena as potential explanations.

Underwood goes from effortlessly hitting his marks, in an admittedly clichéd role, to demonstrating an absolutely pitch-black sense of ruefully morbid humor, during this film's final act.

"Longlegs" also benefits from "Mad Men" alumnus Kiernan Shipka — who's more than earned her own suspense stripes, from 2018-2020's "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" on Netflix, to 2023's "Totally Killer" on Amazon Prime Video — here playing the sole survivor of a family that was apparently murdered by remote possession.

Shipka's absent affect hammers home how much anything that might have defined her character, before those murders, has simply checked out of her head. That seeming soullessness is far more unnerving than any of Cage's high-pitched histrionics.

Since we'll have to address him eventually, I'm not spoiling anything by revealing that Cage's character is the "Longlegs" of the film's title, and to give credit where it's due, the film's prosthetic makeup team did a yeoman's job of rendering the notoriously eccentric actor virtually unrecognizable.

Cage's "Longlegs" character appears to be succumbing to a particularly ghastly form of accelerated decrepitude.

It's a sign of Perkins' directorial talent that he deliberately withholds a full, unobstructed view of Cage as "Longlegs" for as long as he does, because much like "Bruce the Shark," the malfunctioning animatronic prop in Steven Spielberg's "Jaws," Cage in the makeup is far more frightening when we can't see all of him at once.

Unfortunately, Cage's pantomime-level performance attempts to gild the lily of his appearance, and what could have been unsettling becomes merely absurd instead, much like too many would-be onscreen successors to Hannibal Lecter.

As much as I rolled my eyes at Cage's insufficiently sinister sing-song mania, what redeemed "Longlegs" for me upon a repeat viewing was the brilliant Alicia Witt, in a supporting role I won't spoil.

On Aug. 21, Witt turns 49 years old (the same age as me), and she's been a crackerjack talent for literally most of her life.

Witt's Swiss Army knife versatility has allowed her to play in teen indie films, network sitcoms, weepy Oscar-bait dramas, police procedurals, and name-brand cable franchises ranging from "The Sopranos" to "The Walking Dead."

I mention these past highlights because, in "Longlegs," I daresay Witt outshines all those previous performances, opening with a subtle, sensitive and uncomfortably authentic depiction of mental illness as a muted, inexorable erosion of one's faculties and identity, which makes it all the more shocking when she goes for broke in the story's revelatory climax.

Between "Longlegs" and 2023's "The Beast," which I reviewed earlier this year, I feel like we're being treated to a refreshing wave of films that have no compunction about leaving their heroes in states of spiritually destitute damnation, by the time their closing credits roll.