Past Misdeeds: It Follows (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Jay (Maika Monroe) certainly didn’t expect the first night of sex (and perhaps her first night of sex ever) with her new boyfriend (Jake Weary) to be the beginning of a nightmare. Right afterwards, he sedates her, and when she wakes up, she finds herself inside of the ruins of a parking garage and tied to a wheelchair, while her former beau circles the area, clearly looking out for someone (something?), and explaining the new rules of her life to her. If he is to be believed, Jay is now infected with the attentions of a supernatural entity that inexorably, mostly in slow walking tempo, will try to get closer to her, to finally be able to touch and kill her. The only escape is passing the thing on via intercourse like a very nasty sexual chain mail; then she’d be safe from the thing, at least until it has killed whomever she has infected. Afterwards, it’d be back on her trace again. Which, obviously, is also the reason for the very weird exposition session.

Once she’s free again, Jay is as shell-shocked as one would suspect, yet when she finds herself followed by an old woman in what looks like a hospital gown during school, she very quickly begins to believe the insane story. It’s all true too – with added little horrors like the fact the thing can only be seen by the infected or the once infected, and stays invisible (yet, as it turns out, not untouchable) by anyone else while its projects some disturbing shape at its chosen victim. When Jay seeks help from her sister Kelly (Lile Sepe), and her friends Yara (Olivia Luccardi) and Paul (Keir Gilchrist), they unexpectedly don’t think she’s crazy for long. At least, her fear seems to be real enough to them, and come time, the reality of the thing following Jay will be too. Perhaps, that’s even enough to safe her life.

It seems absolutely useless to pretend I harbour any feelings of distance towards David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. Most certainly, there’s nothing at all I find worth criticizing here, so prepare for me gushing about some of the things that are incredible about the film for the next three hundred words or so. Honestly, though, I can’t see how the film doesn’t deserve this and more.

So let’s start with my joy about encountering a film about a sexually transmitted supernatural disease that is not at all attempting to blame its protagonists, or sex as such, or the evil shallow youth of today, or the Internet; in fact, it even understands the shitty little things someone might do for survival, yet doesn’t use them to suggest someone deserves whatever horrible thing might happen to him/her because of that. This fits nicely into a very un-horror movie like approach to characterization where the mandatory group of more or less teenage friends indeed feel like people who have actual relationships with each other, as well as a shared past and sympathy and love for one another, instead of being a bunch of assholes who hate one another and are only sharing a film because the scriptwriter feels the need to represent certain clichés (or is part of a cabal of Cabin in the Woods style cultists), if they fit as part of a social group or not. This doesn’t mean there aren’t echoes of your typical horror film characters here, but Mitchell reimagines these archetypes as people. Not surprisingly, that’s an effective way to make an audience care about one’s characters.

I also just love how subtle a film surrounding a very unsubtle metaphor about sexually transmitted diseases can be in practice. Instead of being a film all about sexual disease (or sex as a disease, or pregnancy fears and so on) It Follows shows itself more interested in the ways people of its characters’ age group and social stratus relate to one another, and what sexuality, and friendship, and love mean to them. A lot of the film’s effectiveness here can be explained through its absolute focus on its characters and their travails, never giving the impression this is a film whose only reason for existence is to teach its audience a valuable lesson. Unless that lesson is “it’s complicated”, because that – emotionally and ethically – certainly is part of It Follows. There is also a blessed lack of irony to praise in this regard, with no moment at all when the film feels the need to turn and wink at its audience, never keeping it secure in the knowledge that this is all just a bit silly, and a bit of a joke. Mitchell and his film treat the Weird (and this film really deserves the capitalization of the w) without any of that desperate need to demonstrate they are above it, keeping it a disquieting, and un-natural part of their world.

Furthermore, it’s not difficult to appreciate how much of the film’s plot works via suggestion, how some particularly important points of it are never explained or told outright, but impressed on the viewer via the excellent young actors doing their stuff and the film insinuating things instead of just outright telling them.


All this does sound a bit dry, of course. However, Mitchell isn’t just a very interesting and thoughtful director of the social, but also one hell of a horror director. It’s – for me, at least – completely impossible not to gush about the way It Follows makes use of the whole of the screen – depth and width – soon keeping the audience watching the background and seemingly innocuous parts of the screen just like its characters do. It’s remarkable too that most of the film’s fright scenes take place by daylight, at the same time providing Mitchell with the opportunity to avoid various horror movie mainstays/clichés that only ever work at night, and giving him the space to come up with new ones based on large, open and often even well lit spaces. At the same time, Mitchell’s direction understands the intimate equally well, with many a moment that fleshes out characters in simple yet very effective visual ways. And because there’s also an irrepressible threat following the characters, even these quiet, human moments are infected with a degree of dread waiting just in the corner of the characters’ eyes. It’s fantastic work, even more so in a film that doesn’t suffer from the bad final ten minutes syndrome  that has annoyed me in many a horror film; in It Follows, there’s hope, and dread, and existentialism, and no need for a showy twist that turns everything that came before into meaningless pap.