It Follows

Director: David Robert Mitchell
Screenplay: David Robert Mitchell
Stars: Maika Monroe (Jay Height), Keir Gilchrist (Paul), Daniel Zovatto (Greg Hannigan), Lili Sepe (Kelly Height), Olivia Luccardi (Yara), Jake Weary (Hugh / Jeff), Loren Bass (Annie’s Father), Charles Gertner (Neighbor Boy), Bailey Spry (Annie), Debbie Williams (Mrs. Height), Ruby Harris (Mrs. Redmond)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S.
It Follows
It FollowsOne of the best things about David Robert Mitchell’s superb new horror thriller It Follows is that we never really find out what “it” is. Too many contemporary horror films are overly eager to explain their monsters, to understand the fundamentally inexplicable, and to provide backstories and mythologies, all of which serves to make their monstrosities a little less monstrous and the experience of watching the films a little more comfortable and ultimately reassuring. After all, one of the most terrifying human emotions is confusion and not knowing, something we combat with virtually every tool in the arsenal of modern life, especially technology. The moment we give something a name, know its history, and understand its motives, it becomes a little less insidious, a little less tormenting. The “it” of It Follows is above all a force of torment, a relentless entity that we, like the film’s besieged protagonist, gradually come to know without actually knowing. We see the edges, but it is ultimately unfathomable because Mitchell refuses to explain everything.

The film is set primarily in the Detroit suburbs, although there are scenes in which the characters venture past “the 8 Mile” into the dilapidated, decaying urban center, which introduces thematically resonant images of death and decay. The setting is intriguing because, even though the location is specific, the time period is made purposeful contradictory. The cars suggest the present day, while the muted, earth-toned interior designs and technology within (small cathode ray televisions with rabbit ears playing black-and-white movies telephones that plug into the wall) suggest some time in the mid-1970s. No one has a cell phone, and the only piece of contemporary technology is a handheld clamshell eReader that one character has constantly with her. The time period is further muddied by Richard Vreeland’s musical score (working under the name Disasterpeace), whose manner of building layers of repetitive beats via heavy synthesizers and drum machines is reminiscent of John Carpenter’s work in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

The protagonist is a teen girl name Jay (Maika Monroe), who lives a relatively bland suburban existence with her younger teenage sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and their (either divorced or widowed) mother, who is little more than a peripheral figure with no real engagement in their lives. Her two best friends, Paul (Keir Gilchrist) and Yara (Olivia Luccardi), are constantly at her house, creating a kind of extended adolescent family that will become crucial once Jay finds herself under supernatural assault. That assault comes in the form of a slowly moving, shape-shifting entity that begins following her after she has sex with her boyfriend, Hugh (Jake Weary).

As it turns out, Hugh had been the subject of this thing’s relentless pursuit, and by having sex with Jay, he passed it on to her like a paranormal venereal disease. As Hugh explains to her in one of the film’s tensest, most agonizing sequences, the thing (which only she can see) can appear at any time, in any place, in any form—we first see it as a naked woman, but it takes all kinds of forms including a strangely tall man, a young boy, an elderly woman in a hospital gown, a naked man standing on top of Jay’s house. Hugh never says what exactly will happen if it ever catches up to her, although we already know because Mitchell opens the film with a creepy prologue featuring another teen girl terrorized by and running from an unseen entity before finally resigning herself to her fate on a deserted lakeshore, after which we get a shock cut to her dead, twisted body, one leg broken so badly that her foot is pointed in the wrong direction. The visceral result of violence functions much like the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960): It establishes the stakes with such force that it taints everything that comes after.

And that, essentially, is the plot of It Follows, although that description hardly does justice to the emotional and relational depths the film plumbs in playing out its unnervingly nightmarish premise (not surprisingly, Mitchell was initially inspired by a recurring nightmare of being pursued by a slow, unrelenting predator). Like his previous film, The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010), It Follows doubles as a sociological portrait of contemporary American adolescence, which is heightened by the virtual absence of adult figures except at the very margins of its characters’ lives. Unlike so many horror filmmakers who see their teenage characters as disposable necessities, Mitchell takes the time to flesh out Jay, Kelly, Paul, and Yara, portraying them as average kids who have deep wells of empathy and the potential for self-sacrifice.

Jay, for example, could easily escape her torment by simply sleeping with someone else, an action that Hugh encourages her to do on more than one occasion, but she resists, knowing that she would be simply damning someone else, which speaks volumes about her own moral character. The same could be said for Paul, Kelly, and Yara, who tend to believe Jay even when her story makes no sense and are ultimately willing to stand by her (the film reminds me, in this regard, of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, which also benefitted from its teen protagonists displaying elements of generosity and morality). Their group is eventually joined by Greg (Daniel Zovatto), another teen who lives across the street from Jay and with whom she had a brief fling the previous year, which creates some tension with Paul, who was Jay’s first kiss back in the day and clearly still pines for her. That both Greg and Jay are ultimately willing to “sacrifice” themselves by sleeping with Jay is not surprising, and it plays into the film’s queasy sense of gallows humor.

That sense of humor creeps around the edges of the film, which is otherwise a straightforward, un-ironic chiller that relies little on jump scares and much more on an escalating sense of dread. Mitchell derives maximum tension from the film’s central conceit, which he plays out in various ways. Because the supernatural force looks like ordinary human beings, it is impossible to tell right away if it is the thing or just a person, which induces a sense of constant paranoia. Like Jay, we find ourselves scanning her surroundings, looking at people in the background, wondering if perhaps one of them isn’t what he or she appears to be. The entity is always walking, never running, and always straight toward Jay, which plays off the old menace/joke of slashers who somehow manage to keep up with their victims despite moving at a slow, steady pace. Jay can always run away or get in a car, but she’s never actually safe. And that is what makes the premise to horrifying: No matter what she does, no matter where she goes, no matter who she is with, the thing will always return and keep coming after her.

The horror of her predicament is also deepened by the fact that only she can see this entity. Even though her friends believe her, they never see the thing coming at her, which at first makes her seem simply delusional (the same can be said of the teen girl we see in the prologue, who appears to be running away from nothing). Thus, she is fundamentally alone, one of the most terrifying feelings, even when she’s surrounded by her friends and family. Mitchell and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis find consistently intriguing visual means of conveying her isolation and the omnipresent threat around her. One of their favorite devices is the 360-degree camera, something few filmmakers feel comfortable employing. Numerous times in the film (including the very first shot), Mitchell slowly pivots the camera all the way around the environment, which visually rhymes with the entity’s slow but steady forward progression toward Jay while also making all of the space around her menacing. It’s a fascinating visual approach and one that is used with just enough judicious restraint that it never becomes distracting or repetitive. Even though the setup of It Follows creates little more than variations on the same basic threat, the film maintains a rigorous tension that is as unrelenting as the ambiguous monstrosity that keeps coming at us.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (3.5)




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