With It Follows,
David Robert Mitchell puts his own spin on the unstoppable supernatural force
subgenre: no uttering strange incantations or taking something that doesn’t
belong to you; here, if you have sex with someone who is cursed, the curse
passes to you. Wherever you go a spirit (could be male, female, old or young) follows
you – always walking, never running – and it always finds you. All you can do
is give the curse to someone else, by sleeping with them.
It
Follows has some imaginative cinematography, an impressive John
Carpenter-inspired score by Disasterpeace (real name, Rich Vreeland), and
plenty of frank, true-to-life dialogue (Mitchell, who wrote the screenplay,
knows how teenagers think and behave). The massive, hard-to-ignore problem is
that the film’s not scary. At all. Not even slightly.
Mitchell has a fantastic, original idea for a horror film,
and he wastes it. The opening is intriguing enough: a young girl runs out of
her house, steals her dad’s car and makes several phone calls saying goodbye to
the people she loves. In the next scene she’s dead, her body lying on a beach, contorted
into an impossible shape. Mitchell makes the wise decision of only showing glimpses
of his nameless spirit, but despite using wide shots to great effect, making
you search the screen to try and work out where the ghost will appear next,
there is no tension here, no threat. The spirit rarely appears and, when it
does, it’s easy enough to avoid (keep running, shoot it in the head, or, if all
else fails, lock the door and you’ll be fine). Earlier – and better – ghost
stories, such as Jacques Tourneur’s Night
of the Demon or Hideo Nakata’s Ring
keep their antagonist out of sight, yet still manage to scare you, to convince
you that a powerful force is after its main character and can’t be stopped.
Scenes that, on paper, should be tense, look away from
the screen set pieces are let down by ropey CGI. It Follows’ ghost is silent, so if your back’s turned you’ve no clue
it’s there. This happens during one scene as you wait for the inevitable pay
off. What follows looks terrible. CGI has been the downfall for many low budget
horrors (the closing seconds of Paranormal
Activity), and It Follows falls
into this same trap. The film’s climax falls flat; it’s unintentionally funny
thanks to some dodgy CGI toasters and hairdryers.
Mitchell even has the nerve to throw in some cheap
scares, the kind that sub-par horror films have dredged up since the seventies:
a football hitting a window, a shelf collapsing in an old house. If you’re a fan
of horror, these shocks won’t even register.
It
Follows isn’t a complete mess. Instead of the easy option – take
some dark locations and point and shoot – Mitchell plays around with the
visuals. One highlight has Maika Monroe on a park swing at night. She turns her
head and the camera cuts to where she’s looking. Nothing. She turns her head
again. Nothing. Looks behind her. Again, nothing. This goes on for just over a
minute, no music, just Monroe’s breathing. While Mitchell avoids an obvious scare,
the smartest thing would have been for nothing to happen here and cut to the
next scene (that’s what early John Carpenter or Dario Argento would have
plucked for).
Mitchell’s young cast are all using mobiles, Kindles and
social media sites, contrasting this with shots of run down Detroit. Like the
malevolent ghosts of M.R. James’ stories, there is no explanation for why the
spirit in It Follows does what it
does, but the various crumbling buildings at sunset suggest that this is an ancient
evil, let loose in these technology-driven times.
Maika Monroe gives an excellent portrayal of a young
woman who is not only working out how she sees herself, her body, and how
others (especially boys) look at her, she also struggles when she figures out the
curse’s Get Out of Jail Free card. The boy who gives her the curse tells her
she’ll be fine; “You’re a girl, you’re pretty”, but it’s not about that. Sex is
important to Monroe’s caring, gentle Jay, something she only does with a man
she loves. Jay takes a long time to work out what she wants to do; she’s having
sex to stay alive, but this still makes her feel cheap.
Much of a horror film’s power comes from the isolation of
the protagonist. It Follows bucks
this trend, Jay having friends who are willing to go out of their way to help
her, even risk their own lives. The whole cast are believable: shy, introverted
Paul (Keir Gilchrist) who can’t convey what’s going on in his head, or Yara
(Olivia Lucardi), an attractive girl still working out how to dress and make
herself look. You can’t fail to notice that Jay’s female friends all comfort
her, give her emotional support, while her male friends quickly volunteer to sleep
with her. In a subtly written scene, Paul asks Jay why she chose to have sex
with Greg (Daniel Zovatto) and not him. Jay explains it’s because she cares
about Paul that she didn’t sleep with him; Greg’s tough, he’s proactive, she
knew he would be okay. Jay couldn’t take that risk with Paul and end up losing
him.
Disasterpeace’s score for It Follows is something special. Using old-school electronic
synths, Vreeland deftly flits between gentle, vulnerable sounding pieces, to
discordant and brooding. Vreeland’s score can remind you that here we have a
protagonist who is still figuring out how to find love and how express it, but
also that there is something coming after Jay, something wrathful, that could
be anywhere at any time. If anything, too much pressure is put on Vreeland and
his music; there is no pace to Mitchell’s script, its antagonist isn’t anywhere
near as frightening or convincing as it needs to be. Vreeland is doing all the
work here, and while his music is outstanding, it can’t hold up an entire film.
It
Follows
is a waste of a great idea. Mitchell’s script doesn’t even take the time to examine
what you would do in Jay’s situation. Would you chat up a guy in a bar, pass it
on to a willing friend/victim, go on one of these meet for sex websites? Also,
how different is it for men who have the curse compared to women? None of this
is discussed in any great detail. Despite being influenced by early horror
films that ooze atmosphere (Jaume Balagueró’s The Nameless, Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on:
The Grudge, the Pang Brothers’ The
Eye) It Follows won’t scare you;
you’re less likely to be thinking about it after you leave the cinema, more
wondering why the poster has so many rave reviews. Mitchell’s second film isn’t
the worst horror film of recent years, but it’s one of the biggest let downs.
2 out of 5
Matt
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