IT FOLLOWS
US, 2015, 100 minutes, Colour.
Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary.
Directed by David Robert Mitchell.
On the one hand, this teenage horror thriller has received accolades from critics and has been popular with the target audience. On the other hand, there have been quite a lot of criticisms that the film is a poor example of what it sets out to be.
A film which has a title It Follows should make logical sense. This is not true of so much of the screenplay here, sometimes giving the impression that the makers were making it up as they went along, not plotting cause and effect, simply offering sequences and moving on to another whether it made sense or not. It might be argued that that the film is a subjective perspective from the central character, sometimes hallucinating, sometimes dreaming – which might give some explanation to scenes that seemed to have no connection at all (the heroine fleeing from her pursuer in the house, driving away intensely, then found sleeping on the top of her car near the beach, then seeing three men in a boat and stripping to her bathing suit – and a sudden cutting to her sleeping on the floor of the house!).
Once again, those in favour of the film have referred to the performances as “understated”. This reviewer, thought that they were barely stated at all, not very convincing performances and not helped by the rather flat dialogue.
What was stated, or overstated, was a loud and strident discordant musical score from a group called Disasterpeace.
There is a prologue which seems to indicate much more than what follows, a terrified woman running in the streets, getting into the her car, ruminating on the beach, a sense of something dreadful; morning comes and there is her body lying on the beach, limbs distorted, some broken. No other reference made to this throughout the film, simply a suggestion that something fearful could be following.
The main characters are teenagers seemingly in high school, perhaps the final year. One is a visiting male character who is referred to as being 21. Parents seem to be absent, a glimpse or two, and the final glimpse of a murderous mother, but, otherwise, where were they, especially as some of the characters spend some time in hospital with only their friends waiting around?
The central character, Jay, has some girlfriends (one, bespectacled, reading continually from a Kindle which looks like a compact case and quoting Dostoevsky) and an admirer, a kind of dorky character called Paul. She is going out with the 21-year-old visitor who sees a girl in a cinema which his girlfriend doesn’t see. He then becomes pretty nervy, but they do have a sexual encounter in his car, with his running off without explanation. The apologising when they track him down. Later, we discover that this sense of dread, with a sense of someone following, can be passed on through sexual encounter, some noting this as an allegory of STDS (though film reviewer, Alan Frank, thought this meant Sexually Transmitted Demons).
There are many more sequences, some isolated, with a kind of cumulative effect of horror and fear, and an attempt at STDing bringing death to a young man, and a final attempt, which seems rather inconclusive – leaving the heroine and the dork still possessed and doing the following, when the film just stops.
As regards youth films, despite the STDS, the film is rather ordinary, the setting being somewhere out of Detroit – although a climactic scene takes place in a dilapidated suburb (or is that just the perspective of the heroine?) in a large, old and neglected building which, inside, says Detroit Pool, quite a good looking and well-kept swimming pool, where a confrontation with an anonymous Follower takes place. This is the blood scene, no gore!
This review is not a fan’s response, but rather an expression of exasperation and disappointment.
