Adulthood is scary. An imaginary foe constantly stalking you is even worse.
Much can be, and has been, written about the layers of subtext surrounding David Robert Mitchell’s delightfully subdued supernatural tale It Follows. Borrowing heavily from the slow-paced suburbia under siege of John Carpenter’s Halloween, Follows can be seen as a tale of youth drastically thrust into the perils of adulthood or the inevitability of death but by and large, at its most basic level, it is quite the effective horror film.
After sex, our heroine Jay (Maika Monroe) awakens in her underwear strapped to a wheelchair in an abandoned structure. Her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary) nervously paces the structure, flashlight in hand, as he explains the rules to Jay. Passed through sex, the curse if you will dooms the afflicted to a lifetime of relentless pursuit by a supernatural force determined to kill. ‘It’ can take the form of a stranger or even someone you know if it helps ‘It’ get closer to that goal. You can pass it to someone else but you are never completely safe since ‘It’ comes back around after killing the latest victim.
Mitchell does his film a huge favor by not delving into what ‘It’ is any more than that. Much like Halloween, Mitchell knows the greatest fear comes from the unknown, not with lengthy origins and back-stories. This simplistic outline is all we need for the next hour and change for Jay (along with sister Kelly and friends Paul and Yara for support) to become a withdrawn, paranoid mess as tensions and encounters increase.
Much like the stalker itself, the film has almost as leisurely a pace without the typical Hollywood tropes of rapid cuts and action for the sake of action. The events unfold very naturally, especially between Jay and her friends, who are initially skeptical but become slowly more involved as they look for Jay’s missing boyfriend and her encounters ratchet up. With really only one victim at stake (two once you include consensual conquest Greg), much of the film is simply playing the waiting game as Jay et al. attempt to let their guard down only for ‘It’ to find them.
Mitchell and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis make effective use of the slow-pace and multitude of surrounds to evoke paranoia in the viewer much like it does in Jay. For every medium shot of Jay or group shot of friends, you are constantly scanning for a slow, otherwise normal-looking figure steadfastly walking toward the targets. This effectively turns the film into a horrible edition of “Where’s Waldo?” as the peripherals of the film’s frame become the focus as you search for the inherent danger approaching.
While the film has a bit of trouble sticking the landing (and honestly, with a basically invisible, unstoppable supernatural force, there’s not a clear out to go with), the vast majority of the film carries a very palpably tense atmosphere. Without clear direction or a compelling performance from Monroe, the film easily falls apart as a throw-back slasher-type, even with the sometimes overbearing synth-heavy score. But with all the excellence in the mix, It Follows becomes one of the most talked about horror films for good reason.
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