Poor kids. Whatever admonishment they might have received about VD in their time- indeterminate heath or sex ed. classes couldn't have prepared them for this. The "It" which trails the unfortunate young people in It Follows might find its eventual victims through the congress of young fluid and flesh, but it's far more nasty and persistent than a case of the clap. Ironically, the only hope - and this is one of many things about It Follows which is less than clear - of ridding oneself of the ghost of hookups past is to have sex with someone else and pass "It" on. Thus, the walk of shame becomes the sprint, the desperate bike ride, the speeding car ride of terror. And yet..."It" does inexorably follow. Pick those partners carefully young lovers.
With its placid suburban point of origin and sonic pressure gauge of blaring synthesizers, It Follows pays a good bit of homage to John Carpenter. As with Carpenter's Halloween, only the virginal seem likely to get out of It Follows alive. Fortunately, there's no such puritanical edge to David Robert Mitchell's story. Instead, the writer and director cites adolescent dreams as the genesis of the film's plot. The morbid and the erotic swirl around young minds in strange ways. Compare It Follows treatment of that dark blend to something like Park Chan-wook's leering admixture of the same in Stoker (2013) and you realize one of the several ways in which It Follows is better than so much of the torture porn and cheap thrills that have passed for horror in American film the past couple of decades. Mr. Mitchell is not thinker nor story architect enough to make It Follows a masterpiece. However, It Follows succeeds in the manner audiences most want it to succeed, draping one in an unease not easily shaken.
As a director, Mitchell seems to understand something about building and sustaining tension which is beyond the ability or interest of most of his colleagues. There are moments of jarring action in It Follows, interludes frequently heralded by cresting waves of ominous synthesizer so redolent of Carpenter (who composed synthesized scores for some of his films as well as directing). Occasionally, these walls of sound tumble into an atonal and percussive wash. Rich Vreeland, experienced mainly in gaming soundtracks to this point, apparently listened to John Cage and Krzystof Penderecki (whose work is featured in The Excorcist and The Shining) prior to composing the score for It Follows. Between these instances of blaring soundtrack and blatant action, Mitchell allows the tension to slowly mount. The central plot question in any horror film is whether and when the dreaded thing, the "It" will appear. The director doesn't shy from letting us view several incarnations of "It." For the most part though, we, like kids in It Follows, wait for the next appearance of the pedestrian from hell. The tension becomes palpable.
It Follows is largely a triumph of mood over plot. Most of the following, the plot, such as it is, afflicts the unfortunate Jay (Maika Monroe), apparently a college student home for the summer. Before we see Jay floating in a backyard pool, regarding tree branches and the summer sky beyond - a scene we're aware is far too innocent and placid to remain long undisturbed - the mood has been well set.
We're taken through a subdivision at twilight before the camera comes to rest. A young woman emerges from one of those cookie-cutter houses like a driver from a race car burning with invisible methanol flames - we can't see the problem, but the girl's tremulous movements and breaking voice make it clear that she's fleeing something sinister. This pre-title interlude continues as she sits on a beach, lake behind her and car before her, that latter throwing its combined spotlight of head lamps onto the resigned, sitting figure in sand, while she apologizes to her father via cell phone for the ways in which she has been a pain in the ass kid. When morning arrives, we get an example of director Mitchell's sharp framing. The young woman is still there on the beach, but what is that poking its way into the top, right, portion of the frame: a horn? a hoof? a tree branch, perhaps? We're given the answer with a more removed perspective. Just a brief shot, but chillingly effective.
Bodies of water, natural and man-made, figure prominently in the action of It Follows: the pool in which Jay floats dreamily, the lakes to which she and that first victim ultimately flee; the municipal pool in which Jay and her friends attempt to lure what follows her so they can perhaps electrify the body in which it which it has taken up residence. Sanctuary is sought in the water, on its verge. But as ever, water brings its evocation of danger, the unknown, something sinister beneath the shimmering surface. Rather like the wariness with which sex is sometimes pondered by those who haven't yet taken the plunge. Certainly the wariness with which any of the kids in It Follows come to view sex and the possibility of bringing "It" plodding inexorably into their lives.
David Robert Mitchell is from the Detroit suburb of Clawson. He has placed both of his features (including his first, The Myth of the American Sleepover) in the Detroit area, much as the city is never explicitly named in It Follows. It's at the city's west side Redford Theater that Jay accompanies the relative stranger, Hugh (Jake Weary) on a date. A game of trying to figure out who the other person would like to be in the crowd of movie attendees continues from the concession stand to auditorium. But when Hugh indicates a woman at an exit he thinks might be Jay's alter ego of choice, she can't see the figure to whom he's pointing. Hugh nervously decides to cut short the preliminary of the movie and get to the main event of the date. We come to realize the his ulterior motives are more darkly freighted than most young men on the make.
As with several shots of cars gliding by abandoned lots and derelict buildings and the exploration of Hugh's fake address in one of those ghost houses, Mitchell uses his insider's knowledge of Detroit to more thorough advantage than most Detroit-set films. Jim Jarmusch clearly relished the beautiful ruins of the city utilized in Only Lovers Left Alive, but his was still a tourist's point of view.
Jay and Hugh's date proceeds to an overgrown lot adjacent to one of the city's many disused factories. The two have backseat sex in Hugh's luridly-lit 1970's vintage Chrysler. The brief shot of girl mounted upon boy gives to Jay, prostrate across the back seat, head out an open door, teasing a wildflower with one hand, while musing on how she had previously imagined how just such evenings would go. Her post-coital reflections are cut short when Hugh climbs on her back, wraps an arm around her neck and then presses a chloroform-soaked rag into her face. Jay awakens strapped to an old wheelchair in the nearby factory. This the legendary Packard Plant, one of the grandest of Detroit's industrial ghosts. It's the same site by which vampires Adam and Eve merely drove (in a Jaguar, for heaven's sake) in Only Lovers Left Alive, so Adam could exclaim, "the PACK-ard plant, where they once built the most beautiful cars in the world." According to Maika Monroe, the first site the film crew tried to use for the scene was problematic in that a dead body was found on the premises, hardly an unusual occurrence in Detroit. The city's reality continues to frighten more than any of its projected fictions.
Hugh proceeds to explain that he means Jay no harm, or at least no further harm. "You're not going to believe me, but I need you to remember what I'm saying....This thing...it's gonna to follow you....Somebody gave it to me and I passed it to you....Wherever you are, it's somewhere...coming straight for you...It's slow, but it's not stupid." Hugh explains all of this while "It" in female form moves steadily through the vegetation of wild Detroit, crosses a disused section of train track and approaches the factory. He's good enough to wheel Jay away before the thing can get her (he later explains that if she's killed and "It" will come for him, go "right down the line") and dump her unceremoniously in front of her house. Good luck!
So begins Jay's torment and flight from "It." Her first sighting occurs one afternoon at school, while a teacher is reciting Eliot's "Prufrock" to her class. On this occasion, "It" is an old woman in a hospital gown, plodding in Jay's direction and visible to no one else. The desperate Jay eventually enlists her sister and a few neighborhood friends to help her. They come to realize that there is something real stalking their friend, however invisible to them.
The odyssey of Jay and her friends take them all over the city and presumably many miles north to a vacation home where they have a beach confrontation with "It." There's a good bit David Robert Mitchell's story gets right with this group of kids. The removal from the present day frees him from dialog which strains after an of the moment credibility. Instead, there's something more timeless in the tribal nature of adolescents, it alliances and jealousies. It's Greg (Daniel Zovatto), the relative outsider, who provides a car for the group's detective work and escape. It's his family's vacation home "up North" (as we're wont to say in Michigan) to which the group flees the infernal follower. Greg even has sex with Jay knowing full well the consequences, very much to the chagrin of the Paul (Keir Gilchrist), more the pining nerd to the late-comer's young alpha male. Paul has been aching after Jay for years and would willingly be torn limb from limb by "It" to win her affection.
The parents are almost completely absent in It Follows. This is certainly convenient to plot, but it's another quietly fitting aspect of Mr. Mitchell's story. The mysteries of adolescence, the daily struggles and the blatant dangers, seem to require a certain amount of detachment, even estrangement from the parents. And so it goes in It Follows, the kids operating almost entirely on their own.
Mitchell gets good work out of his young cast. It's not easy being the stalked one in a horror film, the acting options tend to become rather condensed and a one-note hysteria is the common result. And who wants to hang out with THAT person? Maika Monroe evinces a vulnerability of both spirit and flesh common enough to late adolescence. "Is something wrong with me?," she fairly sobs while sitting against a bedroom wall, hands around her knees. At the time, she and her friends are in holed up in the locked room to keep "It" at bay. But Jay's lamenting question echoes through the psyche of most kids, even if they're not being pursued by some avenging spirit in changeable flesh. There's something touching in the way that Jay's friends circle around her even after their understandable initial doubt. Mitchell's young characters, like his story, do not run to expected extremes.
David Robert Mitchell's story, however fresh, does sometimes execute its unexpected turns by way of short cut. This happens in both his handling of time and the vague nature of just why and how "It" proceeds. The temporal setting of It Follows might be undetermined, but its aesthetics, it's automobiles, its wall rotary phones place it mainly in the past. In a general sense, there's something effective in having this vaguely 1960's/70's setting share the same streets with more contemporary vehicles and the expressions of urban blight. It's like a place overlaid, haunted by its own past. But the compact-sized, clam shell reader on which Jay's sister recites from The Idiot doesn't take It Follows out of specific time so much as burden it with a silly (and pretentious) anachronism. Similarly, the cell phone conveniently available to the first victim of "It" - a innovation of which no one else in this world seems aware - is much more a cheap device of plot than a handy accessory of the timeless world of the film.
As for "It" - male, female, old, or young - the thing does move in mysterious ways, but always at a speed which allows the story to move or hover at its desired velocity. Like any peripatetic movie spook, one can best "It" with a steady jog. Not so difficult until you realize that you must keep going. And going. And going. When Jay and her friends escape the city for parts North, presumably a distance of many, even hundreds of miles, "It" arrives the next day after a very impressive power walk. At other times, as when Jay lays in a nearby hospital bed after she and her friends had battled with "It" on that northern beach, the persistent thing seemingly has days to find her and doesn't do so.
The beach encounter proved that "It" can take a bullet. A later confrontation when "It" is lured to a municipal pool (where the lights just happen to be on, the pool full of water, even though the kids had to climb a fence to break into the closed facility) ends with a cloud of blood enveloping the pool, "It" apparently having taken one to the head. No explanation why that particular bullet worked, no resolution to the scene, nor explanation why "It" thus stopped is able to continue with its following before long. Mr. Mitchell handles suspense very skillfully, but doesn't seem to realize that some logic, however far-flung, is required as well. His authority is such that we're able to let many unexplained things flow with the dark mosaic of his story, but there are vague patches that are harder to ignore; we believe the mysterious presence even when the logic itself doesn't follow as effectively.
So begins Jay's torment and flight from "It." Her first sighting occurs one afternoon at school, while a teacher is reciting Eliot's "Prufrock" to her class. On this occasion, "It" is an old woman in a hospital gown, plodding in Jay's direction and visible to no one else. The desperate Jay eventually enlists her sister and a few neighborhood friends to help her. They come to realize that there is something real stalking their friend, however invisible to them.
The odyssey of Jay and her friends take them all over the city and presumably many miles north to a vacation home where they have a beach confrontation with "It." There's a good bit David Robert Mitchell's story gets right with this group of kids. The removal from the present day frees him from dialog which strains after an of the moment credibility. Instead, there's something more timeless in the tribal nature of adolescents, it alliances and jealousies. It's Greg (Daniel Zovatto), the relative outsider, who provides a car for the group's detective work and escape. It's his family's vacation home "up North" (as we're wont to say in Michigan) to which the group flees the infernal follower. Greg even has sex with Jay knowing full well the consequences, very much to the chagrin of the Paul (Keir Gilchrist), more the pining nerd to the late-comer's young alpha male. Paul has been aching after Jay for years and would willingly be torn limb from limb by "It" to win her affection. The parents are almost completely absent in It Follows. This is certainly convenient to plot, but it's another quietly fitting aspect of Mr. Mitchell's story. The mysteries of adolescence, the daily struggles and the blatant dangers, seem to require a certain amount of detachment, even estrangement from the parents. And so it goes in It Follows, the kids operating almost entirely on their own. Mitchell gets good work out of his young cast. It's not easy being the stalked one in a horror film, the acting options tend to become rather condensed and a one-note hysteria is the common result. And who wants to hang out with THAT person? Maika Monroe evinces a vulnerability of both spirit and flesh common enough to late adolescence. "Is something wrong with me?," she fairly sobs while sitting against a bedroom wall, hands around her knees. At the time, she and her friends are in holed up in the locked room to keep "It" at bay. But Jay's lamenting question echoes through the psyche of most kids, even if they're not being pursued by some avenging spirit in changeable flesh. There's something touching in the way that Jay's friends circle around her even after their understandable initial doubt. Mitchell's young characters, like his story, do not run to expected extremes.
David Robert Mitchell's story, however fresh, does sometimes execute its unexpected turns by way of short cut. This happens in both his handling of time and the vague nature of just why and how "It" proceeds. The temporal setting of It Follows might be undetermined, but its aesthetics, it's automobiles, its wall rotary phones place it mainly in the past. In a general sense, there's something effective in having this vaguely 1960's/70's setting share the same streets with more contemporary vehicles and the expressions of urban blight. It's like a place overlaid, haunted by its own past. But the compact-sized, clam shell reader on which Jay's sister recites from The Idiot doesn't take It Follows out of specific time so much as burden it with a silly (and pretentious) anachronism. Similarly, the cell phone conveniently available to the first victim of "It" - a innovation of which no one else in this world seems aware - is much more a cheap device of plot than a handy accessory of the timeless world of the film.
As for "It" - male, female, old, or young - the thing does move in mysterious ways, but always at a speed which allows the story to move or hover at its desired velocity. Like any peripatetic movie spook, one can best "It" with a steady jog. Not so difficult until you realize that you must keep going. And going. And going. When Jay and her friends escape the city for parts North, presumably a distance of many, even hundreds of miles, "It" arrives the next day after a very impressive power walk. At other times, as when Jay lays in a nearby hospital bed after she and her friends had battled with "It" on that northern beach, the persistent thing seemingly has days to find her and doesn't do so.
The beach encounter proved that "It" can take a bullet. A later confrontation when "It" is lured to a municipal pool (where the lights just happen to be on, the pool full of water, even though the kids had to climb a fence to break into the closed facility) ends with a cloud of blood enveloping the pool, "It" apparently having taken one to the head. No explanation why that particular bullet worked, no resolution to the scene, nor explanation why "It" thus stopped is able to continue with its following before long. Mr. Mitchell handles suspense very skillfully, but doesn't seem to realize that some logic, however far-flung, is required as well. His authority is such that we're able to let many unexplained things flow with the dark mosaic of his story, but there are vague patches that are harder to ignore; we believe the mysterious presence even when the logic itself doesn't follow as effectively.
The distance between very good and great for It Follows might have been traversed with some level of subtext. When Jay and her friends are heading toward that closed municipal pool, there's the slightest hint at what might have been. One of the kids mentions the parental warning never to stray south of 8 Mile, the northern boundary of the city. Here, at last, a chance for social allegory, the ills of the city coming to roost in those placid suburbs, white flight have been followed in its own way. Even avoiding the choppier waters of race (which continues to give George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead resonance and life decades on), there's rich potential to make use of Detroit for something more than a post-industrial fun house. Unfortunately, Mr. Mitchell betrays no such interest.
It may be derivative in its way, it might lack the allegorical bite of a greater film, but like that other low-budget American Horror film, Night of the Living Dead, David Robert Mitchell's galvanic It Follows is likely to stalk its way assuredly into the future. Watch most would-be horror films and you have experience of being bounced from your seat a few times, only to shed the experience moments later. Let It Follows envelope you in its 100 minutes of dread and you might just look over your shoulder a few times as you walk away from the theater.
It may be derivative in its way, it might lack the allegorical bite of a greater film, but like that other low-budget American Horror film, Night of the Living Dead, David Robert Mitchell's galvanic It Follows is likely to stalk its way assuredly into the future. Watch most would-be horror films and you have experience of being bounced from your seat a few times, only to shed the experience moments later. Let It Follows envelope you in its 100 minutes of dread and you might just look over your shoulder a few times as you walk away from the theater.
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