It Follows : Movie Review


It Follows (2014) - Movie PosterA radically fresh, hair-raisingly inventive take on a thought-worn subgenre, "It Follows" is supernatural horror as imagined by a filmmaker—that is, writer-director David Robert Mitchell (2011's "The Myth of the American Sleepover")—who has no interest in rehashing the commonplace. Opting for mood-drenched foreboding over obvious jump scares, the film whittles its way into the viewer's increasingly skittish subconscious while proffering a stack of underlying metaphors and themes—about the loss of innocence, about the perils of sexually transmitted diseases, about the struggle to find purpose, acceptance and responsibility in a post-adolescent existence—that reveal it as so much more than just a pedestrian boo machine. In spite of its stop-and-start narrative structure, few motion pictures achieve the level of usurping dread that "It Follows" manages.

19-year-old community college student Jay (Maika Monroe) has only been out a few times with Hugh (Jake Weary), but they get along well and seem to be hitting it off. Shortly after sleeping with him for the first time, she muses about how, as a child, she couldn't wait to be older so she could go on dates. The sky seemed to be the limit back then, the entire endless world spread out before her. Now, however, reality has set in, and it is so much more horrifying than she could have ever imagined. Hugh has infected her with a potentially deadly disease, one that materializes itself in the form of an ever-changing specter that only she can see. It doesn't think, or feel, but it will follow her on foot, ceaselessly and with only one purpose: to take her life. The only way to pass the infection to someone else is through sexual activity, but if said person falls victim, it will return to the previous owner, a never-ending chain that quite possibly can never be stopped.

See Dustin Putman, TheFilmFile.com. for full review

Author : Dustin Putman, TheFilmFile.com.