IT FOLLOWS (2014)

Studio:       Anchor Bay Entertainment
Director:    David Robert Mitchell
Writer:       David Robert Mitchell
Producer:  Rebecca Green, Laura D. Smith, David Robert Mitchell, David Kaplan, Erik Rommesmo
Stars:     Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe

Review Score:

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Summary:

A young woman is stalked by a paranormal presence whose curse can only be transferred through sex.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Annie flees from her parents’ house, terrified by something unseen. The next day, Annie’s body is found mangled on a beach.

While on a date at a movie theater, Hugh points out a girl in a yellow dress to Jay Height. When Hugh realizes that Jay cannot see the girl, he becomes concerned and insists on leaving.

On their next date, Jay and Hugh have sex together for the first time in the backseat of Hugh’s car. Afterwards, Hugh uses chloroform to render Jay unconscious.

Jay wakes to find herself restrained to a wheelchair in an abandoned parking structure. Hugh apologizes as he tells Jay that he passed something to her when they had sex in the car, and it will begin following her the same way it did him. He further explains that the presence can take the form of anyone, including someone Jay knows, in order to get close to her. The only way to get rid of the presence is to pass it to someone else through sex. If whomever it is currently following dies, then it returns to stalk the previous person.

Hugh dumps off Jay at home, reminding her to not let the thing touch her. Jay’s sister Kelly tends to Jay along with their friends Paul and Yara. The police investigate Jay’s claim and Jay goes to the hospital.

Jay flees from school when she sees an old woman in pajamas stalking her. Paul offers to spend the night with Yara and the two sisters to keep an eye out for anything strange.

A bonding moment between Jay and Paul is interrupted by the sound of a broken window in the kitchen. Paul goes to tell Kelly to call the police before a mutilated girl that only Jay can see chases Jay to her bedroom. Kelly and Paul try comforting Jay, but she runs from the house when another mutilated stalker appears behind Yara.

Greg Hannigan, a young neighbor from across the street, joins the others in tracking down Jay. Together with Jay, the five of them begin looking for Hugh.

The old house where Hugh supposedly lived is found abandoned, with aluminum cans on strings in the windows as a makeshift alarm system. Paul finds a photo in a porno magazine leading them to a local high school. At the school, Jay and Greg learn from a yearbook that Hugh’s real name is Jeff Redman.

Jay and her friends find Jeff at his mother’s house. Jeff tells them that he can still see the presence even though he passed it to Jay. Jeff reiterates that all Jay can do is pass it along to someone else.

Greg brings Jay, Kelly, Paul, and Yara to his mother’s beachfront vacation home. Greg retrieves a gun from the shed and teaches Jay to shoot.

The presence grabs Jay’s hair while everyone relaxes on the beach. Although no one but Jay can see it, Paul tries fighting it off and is thrown aside. Paul receives a wound across his stomach. Jay, Paul, Kelly, and Yara lock themselves in the shed. Jay is forced to flee once more when the presence breaks in and shambles toward her. Jay drives away in Greg’s car while her friends call after her.

Distracted, Jay crashes the car into a cornfield and ends up in a hospital. She and Greg have sex in the hospital. Paul’s longtime crush on Jay leads him to become resentful of Greg.

Jay returns home. From across the street, she sees the presence stalking Greg’s house at night. Jay runs into Greg’s house in time to see Greg being attacked and killed by the presence while it poses as Greg’s mother.

Jay returns to the beach and swims to a trio of boys on a boat where she presumably has sex.

Paul brings everyone to an old hangout with an indoor pool where they set up a perimeter of lamps and electrical equipment plugged in with extension cords. Jay enters the water. The presence enters the room with the appearance of Jay and Kelly’s father, but instead of following Jay into the pool, it begins throwing the appliances at Jay.

Paul tries shooting at the invisible presence, but hits Yara in the leg. Kelly throws a sheet over the presence, allowing Paul to see its shape and shoot it into the pool. Jay tries to swim out, but the figure grabs her ankle. Jay swims away just as Paul shoots the presence in its head. Jay ends up with a scarred wound on her ankle similar to the one on Paul’s torso. Jay peers into the pool and sees a large cloud of blood.

Some time later, Jay and Paul have sex. Paul eyes a pair of hookers as he drives around the streets of Detroit. Yara recovers in the hospital. While Jay and Paul walk hand in hand along the sidewalk in their neighborhood, an unknown figure is seen walking behind them in the distance.

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Review:

College girl Jay has contracted an STD more horrible than anything medical science can treat.  After a consensual sexual encounter with Hugh, Jay ends up suddenly chloroformed and restrained to a wheelchair, regaining consciousness in time to hear Hugh spin an unusual story.

Jay is about to be followed.  The thing following her has no known purpose, origin, or name.  It can assume the appearance of anyone it wishes and is only visible to whomever it is stalking.  There is no way to stop it and if it touches her, Jay dies.  The only thing Jay can do is pass it to someone else through the same way she got it.  Even then, if the person it is passed to dies, the paranormal presence returns to follow its previous owner.  Jay is now signed up for a frightful game of supernatural tag where “you’re it” might mean being mangled into a bloody corpse.

“It Follows” can be considered a Slender Man movie that doesn’t actually include Slender Man.  The premise is a deceptively simple mix of J-horror haunting with the now clichéd notion of an unstoppable stalker slowly striding with reserved calm towards a protagonist fleeing in exhilarated panic.  Except instead of a weapon-wielding masked maniac, this stalker can be an elderly woman in pajamas or nondescript girl in a school’s courtyard.  These are innocuous, everyday images that should be comical if used as symbols of terror.  Yet the sinister danger that comes with the framing, music, and reaction of the actors immediately erases any pretense of triviality.

Writer/director David Robert Mitchell doesn’t hide the influence that “Halloween” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” have on his breakthrough horror hit “It Follows.”  Lurking around almost every darkened corner is a hint of Carpenter or a shade of Craven, though not in a manner where Mitchell’s voice is out-shouted.  This isn’t a director aping the masters or blindly copying formulas for cheap success.  Mitchell demonstrates an understanding of why those filmmakers’ techniques worked the way they did, and he slots in those similarities only when it makes sense in telling the tale and weaving the world created here.

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The first shot in “It Follows” is nearly identical to the one establishing Haddonfield in “Halloween” (review here), and it accomplishes the same purpose.  “It Follows” casts a mesmeric spell out of the gate by enveloping the viewer in a relatable realm with a lived-in atmosphere.  This is different than a camera-ready backlot or clean and streamlined soundstage.  This is a comfortable suburban neighborhood with addresses painted on curbs, insects polluting pool water, and rust flecking chain-link fences.  And yet, the literal and figurative dark filter slightly shrouding the serene setting makes the familiarity quietly frightening.

“It Follows” doesn’t build scares on jumps and visceral thrills.  Its horror is a slow-crawling virus that subtly disturbs with under-the-skin eeriness.

Someone taking the story too literally may end up with too many questions regarding the rules for how the paranormal presence works, though it is no more of a disbelief-suspension logic leap than the timeline of the Terminator’s creation or mogwais eating after midnight.  “It Follows” works as suspense-thriller entertainment, and as a cautionary fable about mortality and sexually-transmitted diseases.

An interesting aspect of the central “curse” is that there is culpability behind its ownership.  One cannot simply pass along the paranormal plague, wipe the forehead with the back of a palm and be done.  The person passing it on has a vested interest in the safety of the person it is passed to, otherwise the presence bounces back up the chain in the reverse direction.  The warped morality motivating everyone makes this a bizarre brotherhood where willingly turning someone into a victim also makes that person a partner in survival.

Something else separating “It Follows” from screenplays taking easier routes is that time isn’t needlessly spent on “no one will listen to my crazy story” scenes.  At least one character believes Jay’s claim of an invisible killer is loony, but he assists her anyway, without being placating and without trying to convince her, “you’re imagining all of this.”

Jay’s friends are supportive, coming up with what seem like sensible ways to stop or impede the presence based on what they know at the time.  In keeping with the accessibility afforded by the Midwestern location, Jay and her friends read like ordinary people in an extraordinary situation, not come-to-life headshots preening for a slick CW pilot.

Maika Monroe of “The Guest” (review here) leads the cast as Jay.  Uniquely intriguing about the presentation of Jay’s torment is that, thanks to a prelude scene, the audience has more knowledge than she about the horrors awaiting Jay if she is caught by the follower.  All Jay initially knows is to not let it happen, which makes her perpetual paranoia more wrenching since she is instinctively terrified without fully understanding why.  Because she feels it, and because Monroe conveys it, the audience feels it, too.

“It Follows” capitalizes so well on making Michigan seem like a dreamily dreary version of Anytown, USA that its artistic editing becomes an occasional distraction.  While most are cleverly considered, not all of the camera shots amount to anything.  Several cuts are probably inserted to truncate certain scenes, but their seeming randomness can pull apart the tone’s magnetism in places.  Impatient audiences are already tapping feet at repeated travel montages bridging each beat.  A little more leanness in the tempo and “It Follows” could be unassailably hypnotic.

Due to the scorching hot word of mouth accompanying its festival run the previous year, “It Follows” takes the title of most buzzed-about genre film of 2015 in the same way that “The Babadook” did in 2014.  “It Follows” doesn’t have the emotional resonance of “The Babadook” (review here), though it does work on that same level of infectious horror still stirring in the imagination even after credits roll and eyelids close.

Review Score:  80

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