Warning: I will describe the plot of It Follows below, which might be inherently spoiler-y for some. If you want to see this film with a blank slate, stop reading and see it now.
Director David Robert Mitchell's sophomore effort, It Follows, is a masterpiece of horror cinema. It is wickedly inventive and scary, terrifying the audience from start to finish with well-earned scares and minimal gore. It's also beautifully shot and naturalistic, with an excellent original score that only adds to the tension. Never have I been so excited to see a movie that made me want to curl into a fetal position in my theatre seat.
Taking place in the suburbs of Detroit in an indeterminable time period (all the TVs have rabbit ears and the characters have polaroids hanging in their bedrooms, yet one character has a futuristic smartphone-type device with her at all times), It Follows makes the average and the mundane terrifying and seemingly safe locations very much unsafe.
Jay (Maika Monroe) is a high school student seeing a handsome 21-year-old, Hugh (Jake Weary), who acts suspiciously jumpy at their date to a movie. The two wind up having sex in the backseat of his car, after which he reveals to her that he has passed on a curse. Jay will now be constantly pursued by a thing--a thing that can take any form, even the form of someone she loves--until it catches her or until she passes the curse on to the next person she sleeps with. This thing, and it's never explained exactly what it is, will never stop pursuing her, but it will do so by walking. This means that if Jay gets in a car and drives far enough, she can buy some time before it catches up to her. However, if the thing catches her and kills her, the curse reverts back to the last person who had it (i.e. Hugh), so although she can pass it on, there is always the danger than it could come back at any moment.A couple more rules: only people currently afflicted or previously afflicted by the curse can see the thing, and there is no way to kill it or stop it.
The description of the plot sounds both silly and mind-bogglingly on-the-nose (something that you can't kill, but that can kill you, which is passed on via sexual activity? Hmmm...sounds familiar). But trust me, It Follows is genuinely smart horror. After you gets a taste of what this "thing" is, you can't help but scan the screen for signs of it slowly walking toward the camera. Some forms the thing takes are not very scary (a girl in a white dress), while others are fucking nightmares (an extremely tall man with no eyes)--and you never know what form it will take next.
Mitchell utilizes camera movements and angles to maximize the tension without resorting to cheap jump scares (although I certainly jumped and shrieked a number of times). The absolute relentlessness of the pursuit of the victim by the thing imbues even quiet moments in the film with a sense of danger. The result is a film that feels very fresh and different while also scaring the fucking bejesus out of you.
The obvious metaphor of the film is one of sexual danger and disease, but it's interesting that the cure is more sex, not less. In many horror films, teenagers are punished with death or violence for being sexually active. In It Follows, teens are both punished (by receiving the curse) and rewarded (by escaping it for a while by passing it on) for engaging in sexual activity.
But there is a deeper symbolic meaning to this curse. It is about the inevitability of death and the terror in not knowing when and where it will occur. One character reads a passage about torture and pain from Dostoevsky's The Idiot near the end of the film:
"But the most terrible agony many not be in the wounds themselves but in knowing for certain that within an hour, then within ten minutes, then within half a minute, now at this very instant – your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person, and that is certain; the worst thing is that it is certain.”
The themes of It Follows do, indeed, lack subtleness. Sexual terror. The grim reaper at your door. The journey to adulthood fraught with peril and dismay. The dawning realization that we only have less time to be alive, not more. But for a film with such obvious metaphors, It Follows is as singular a horror film I've seen in a very long while. And after a decade of torture porn like Hostel and Saw, I'm ready for an artful renaissance of the horror genre.
Grade: A-
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