It Follows

"It could look like someone you know or it could be a stranger in a crowd. Whatever helps it get close to you."

*Spoiler brackets*

Jay (Maika Monroe) is a quiet suburban girl whose recently began dating a mysterious guy (Jake Weary). During one of their dates the couple has sex in the back of his car near an abandoned building and afterwards Jay is knocked unconscious by her date. She wakes up bound to a wheelchair in the building where the man begins to describe the curse he's passed onto her. A creature will now follow her wherever she is, but it can only walk. When it reaches her, she'll die and when she dies it continues after the person who first passed on the curse.

There's a recent trend in independent horror film of the last few years to homage and reinvent late 70's and early 80's horror styles. Through direction, cinematography, premise, production design and especially soundtrack, films such as House of the Devil, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Stage Fright and Maniac among others stand independent from the tired trends of blue-filtered, rebooted, CGI-laden, jump-scare slashers that dominate modern horror. David Robert Mitchell's It Follows has the simplest of premises; through sex someone can transfer a curse to you that manifests as a creature that appears as human that is relentlessly following you and when it touches you, you die. It borrows one of Halloween's most iconic shots, while simultaneously Disasterpiece's musical style is influenced great by John Carpenter as well, and Mitchell has claimed that Carpenter and George A. Romero significantly influenced his film.

Visually, It Follows is a gorgeous example of independent film-making.The most suspenseful scenes are composed with undeniable care, with many shots lingering to zoom, pan or maintain dread. The film also employs numerous wide, symmetrical slow-paced shots and often uses space and movement in beautiful, terrifying ways. This film absolutely excels in otherwise dulls scenes as even discussing what Jay and her friends next plan is becomes thrilling as through premise and composition It is always likely to appear. As said earlier, the film has a distinct 70's style and this also manifests in the behaviours of Jay and her group who, despite the incongruity with modern teenagers, are often found watching 50's B-horror films or simply sitting on their porch.

It Follows is a film that grates as it goes on, as the soundtrack at times clashes violently with the scenes it plays over, character logic is child-like, the performances are full of blank stares and mumbled dialogue, the film suffers from an overload of under-cooked characters and soon falls into a dull repitition (arrive at an area, prepare for It to arrive, freak out when it arrives, run away, sit down and pull knees to chest and wait). The mumbled performances do little to hide the inadequacies of the script, as both dialogue and characters fall flat and serve little purpose. The strength of the film is in the situation and having four or five people following Jay around, and only one or two serve any real purpose to the plot.

*The reveal of the creature itself and its killing method is laughable, simply laughable. Most often when it appears, the creature appears as a vulnerable woman in some manner (a naked woman, old woman in a hospital gown, victimised woman beaten, stripped and urinating on herself) or as a white shirt wearing thin man with blackened panda-like eyes, and it is finally two-thirds through the film that the creature murders someone by literally raping their life out of them and this is shown through It impersonating one characters mother and killing him. In these moments, the fear created from the excellent tension that each scene creates instantly dissolves into fits of giggles and guffaws.*

It Follows is a film that does horror well, but is let down by flat characters, repetitive situations and disappointing performance. Gorgeously shot, with many well-paced scenes and a truly terrifying premise, It Follows will scare the life out of you, and yet bore you by the end.