I never understood the "Silence Of The Lambs" comparisons. This has more in common with "Friday The 13th", "A Nightmare On Elm Street", "Halloween", etc.
Longlegs is a supernatural force of evil. He legit has super powers, via the dolls.
The main reason I see reviews comparing these two movies is "young FBI agent tracks a serial killer". Which is a tenuous connection. What makes "Silence Of The Lambs" unique is the mentor/mentee relationship between Clarice and Hannibal. Which obviously doesn't exist here.
Hell, even the "Hannibal" series mirrored that dynamic with Will and Hannibal. That's the point of "Silence Of The Lambs". Not just character descriptions.
Also this sub-genre of horror has been dead for a minute. The three movies I mentioned in the 2nd sentence are lumped in with slasher flicks but "Scream" is also a slasher flick. "Psycho" is a slasher flick.
I'm specifically talking about the sub-genre of super natural killers, like Freddy, Chucky, etc. which is where Longlegs belongs. Off the top of my head I can't remember any movies like that, for a long while until this one.
Fred.
To me, this is more aligned with movies like Seven, which thematically kind of hint at a deeper evil, but don't go there, even if the central villain kind of takes that role--- or Fraility, kind of a forgotten 2002 horror/serial killer/demonic thriller, or, like a mutual favorite, The X Files --in which the means of tracking the killer are all real, no superheroes, no special powers, and most of the killers methods are in the realm of plausible but with one part of supernatural. Toombs, The Pusher, that kind of shyt.
In Fraility, everything is real, with one key exception, but the movie essentially unfolds as a legit thriller.