Finally,
the abstinence education movement has the horror film it has always needed.
When a suburban neighborhood bombshell finally sleeps with her newest boyfriend,
she would have been much more fortunate to be infected with an STD. Instead, she
picks up some sort of supernatural stalker. She can run or she can try to pass
it on to someone else, but there will be no hiding from the malevolent entity
in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (trailer here), which screens
during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
Everyone
on the block is devoted to Jay, including her less glamorous younger sister,
her dweebish elementary school boyfriend Paul, and Greg, the high school bad
boy living next door to him. Ill-advisedly, she has decided to take the plunge
in the mysterious Hugh’s back seat. At first, it is all lovey dovey, but after
a spot of chloroform, she wakes up bound to a wheelchair. At this point, he
gives her the bad news, pointing it out, in the spectral flesh.
An
uncanny entity will now stalk her. It can take the form of any person, but only
she and the formerly infected can see it. It can only walk and it is suspensefully
slow, but it never stops until it catches it prey. Hugh does not want that to
happen to her, because it would then follow the chain back to him again.
Naturally, Jay and her friends assume it was all part of some sick game devised
by the jerk calling himself Hugh, but a few unsettling incidents soon convince
them otherwise.
It Follows is a distinctly
creepy film due to the nature of its bogeyman, who often impersonates close
family members, just to be cruel. Other times it assumes some truly ghoulish
guises, but it could be anyone purposefully walking towards Jay. Yet, Mitchell
also takes the time to develop his characters and establish their relationships.
Even the location of their respective houses is important to his narrative.
Granted,
Adam Wingard’s The Guest went south
about halfway through, but it and It
Follows really herald Maika Monroe as the up-and-coming “It-Girl” of genre
cinema. She does the scream queen stuff well enough, but also forges believable
chemistry with her assorted costars. Keir Gilchrist (a bit of a cold fish in Dark Summer) is particularly effective
in this respect as the torch-carrying Paul.
