This is the best summary I could come up with:

In the first scene of Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama The Fabelmans, the director’s junior stand-in Sammy is traumatized by a train crash – not a real one, though the footage from The Greatest Show on Earth that he watches through the wide eyes of a child feels just as vivid and affective.

While distributor Neon has shrewdly sold the enigmatic project as a serial killer thriller in line with influences Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, two reasons behind his choice to set the film in the 90s, there’s a far darker, stranger, knottier morass of tormented psychology festering beneath the surface.

The term “psychological horror” refers to narratives featuring mental unease at the textual level, but every great tale of terror claws its way deeper into interiority: the shock of self-awareness in Frankenstein’s monster, the perverse carnal charge of Count Orlok, the conflicted duality of Jekyll and Hyde.

Perkins frames the opening scene with rounded corners and a tightened aspect ratio, as if to evoke a family’s home movie shot in hell: on her birthday, young Lee Harker (Lauren Acala) makes the acquaintance of Longlegs himself (Nicolas Cage), a psychical scar that’s still scabbing over when we rejoin her in adulthood as an FBI field agent (and as Maika Monroe).

The rangy hair, the forced falsetto, and the creepily whimsical body language all point back to the neurotically driven gender-play of Norman moonlighting as Mama Bates, and the startling revelation of the shot exposing Perkins in drag.

From his earliest maturity, Perkins realized that no one outside of a family can truly, fully understand what goes on within it; this was his takeaway after learning that his father had lived his entire life as a closeted gay man, going so far as to try conversion therapy, all the while supported by his wife, Berry Berenson, up to his death.

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