It Follows—Movie Review

by Peter J. O'Connell

It Follows. Released: March 2015. Runtime: 100 mins. Rated: R for disturbing violent and sexual content, including graphic nudity, and language.

In recent decades younger filmmakers often have sought to achieve their breakthrough in the business by making a low-budget horror movie with an unknown cast. Sometimes they profit notably, as, for example, with The Blair Witch Project (1999). Most of the time, though, these independent works end up direct-to-video with never a wide theatrical release.

Writer/director David Robert Mitchell's It Follows was slated for just a video-on-demand release when some favorable critical buzz started to surround the film at festival showings. That led to a four-theatre release, which then became a 1,600-theatre release.

The film deserves success, for it has a creative quality that transcends its genre. It uses some typical horror tropes in a measured way while ringing some interesting changes on others. We have the group of teens—few adults are seen—menaced by a monstrous force. We have the illogical flight for safety to an isolated setting. Etc., etc. But we have relatively little gore and few “jump scares.”

Instead, to creep us out, we have a metaphor as the monster. Call It Follows a metaphorical movie. Horror films often mix sex and violence by having teens be killed after engaging in sexual activity. Call this either “exploitation” or “a cultural comment on residual puritanism.”

In Mitchell's more imaginative movie, sex is followed by the emergence of an entity—invisible to most of the characters--that assumes various human forms and seeks to kill the teen who engaged in the sexual activity, unless that teen has sex with someone else first, thus passing on the curse. The entity as presented here could be a metaphor for many things—guilt, regret, loss of innocence, possible unwanted pregnancy, STD (sexually transmitted disease); even the process of growing older itself or various kinds of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

Mitchell's teens decide to kill the entity rather than let it kill their friend Jay (Maika Monroe). This decision leads to a very striking sequence at and in an Olympic-sized swimming pool inside a deserted high school in desolate Detroit during a thunder-and-lightning storm. Electrical appliances play an important role and blood (mucho blood) makes one of its few appearances.

Mitchell's direction eschews the hand-held “shaky cam” and grainy look of many horror films. Instead, his shots are held steady, and his color palette is richly saturated. Mitchell also has “hommages,” as the French say, to some earlier classic films. The beginning sequence in a leafy suburb at dusk reminds one of the town in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). The sequence at the pool nods in the direction of Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942), and the last scene, surprisingly, brings to mind Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967).

 Mitchell's cast is adequate to their tasks, with Maika Monroe, a sad-eyed beauty, and Keir Gilchrist as her dour friend Paul more than adequate. The syntho/techno score composed and performed by Rich Vreeland (a/k/a Disasterpeace) is excellent. The future careers of Mitchell, Monroe, Gilchrist and Vreeland all look like they might well merit following by film fans.

“Footnote” to the film: A curiously unsettling aspect of It Follows is the fact that electronic devices are depicted—clearly deliberately-- as types ranging from the 1950s to the present.