Cinema Reviews

It Follows Review

20th Feb 2015

It Follows opens up with a great teaser of what is to follow. We are introduced to a random teenager fleeing from her house into the street outside. But instead of engaging with the neighbours, or even continuing her “flight” she pauses in the road looking for something, only then to run back to the house to fetch a few things and then promptly make her escape (from what we know not!) in the family car. She heads to the beach, sends a “I Love You” phone message home and then spends her remaining time looking back at the way she arrived. Cut to the next morning and we see what remains of her body.

What happened, we know not.

To go into more detail about what It Follows precisely is about would be too much of a spoiler. Suffice to say that that we are introduced to another teenage girl named Jay who after a sexual encounter with her date is promptly thrown into a nightmarish world where she starts to see strange and horrific things – and that something is after her.

It Follows has such a simple idea at its heart that it will have contemporary filmmakers slapping their foreheads at the simplicity of it all. And how well the premise adds to the scares and the tension is part of the films power. It’s no surprise then that the feel of the film heavily draws from early Carpenter.

Like any good horror film – there is plenty of subtext here as well. Promiscuity in particular as a harbinger of death for those who casually consent is detailed here in a fresh way.

Maika Monroe impressed opposite Dan Stevens in last year’s The Guest and takes her career forward a step. But there is a group of young actors here working well together admidts the confusion, the chaos, and yes there are even a couple of laughs.

It follows perhaps lumbers a little too long in its third act. While tension mounts with each encounter – the finale (while recalling in part Let The Right One In) leaves the audience perhaps mystified and slightly ahead of the characters as they attempt to rid themselves of this curse (but we seem to know better), but does finally come right down to an ending that makes sense for the situation that has been there all along.

This is a masterfully shot film with a very edgy retro-synth soundtrack to boot and is a premise that has the scares literally almost doing the filmmaker’s job for them.