In short: Followed (2018)

The Vlogger – and probably most obnoxious man alive - working under the name of DropTheMike (Matthew Solomon) has gone missing some time ago. A mysterious someone clicks through the not-YouTube clips of Mike’s final big project: a Halloween weekend live stream from the Lenox Hotel, which is a very thinly veiled version of the Cecil Hotel in LA with most of its mythology and bad history intact, only a couple of names changed to make things not too tasteless (and avoid getting sued, one can’t help but think).

Mike has recruited, with measures direct as well as manipulative, his friends Chris (Tim Drier), Danni (Sam Valentine) and Nic (Caitlin Grace) for the project, because he’s really hoping to hit it big and get a lucrative sponsorship contract out of the whole affair, the fact that he’s physically painful to watch whenever he mugs into the camera, and that they are shooting guerrilla style because the hotel really doesn’t want this kind of publicity notwithstanding.

Obviously, Mike and his poor friends will get rather haunting from the hotel than they hoped for.

Some people seem to have seen some sort of incisive movie about “millennials” (whatever the hell that is) and the culture of YouTube celebrities in Antoine Le’s Followed. I, on the other hand, found myself watching a POV horror style ghost train ride that uses its contemporary internet age techniques and ideas to give its scares a greater feeling of authenticity. In fact, if there’s one thing I could really criticize about the film, it’s that it is nothing but horror as a thrill ride, without much depth apart from what it needs to function as an effective bit of showmanship, even the character arcs (and there are indeed some) standing more in service of the horror than the horror being used to explore characters or themes. However, if it works, I’m perfectly fine with horror movies that just want to be a fun, spooky, time for people like me who like that sort of thing; they don’t all have to be Hereditary (which I really should gush about one of these days) or The Witch; it would be a pretty monotonous genre otherwise.

The film’s other problem in my eyes is rather less ambiguous: it takes a little too much time to get Mike to drop (sorry) his authentically obnoxious “content creator” personality, leaving a little too much time for old ass viewers like myself to want to punch the guy in the face so he shuts up. Which is nothing said against Solomon’s performance, for he does obnoxious incredibly well, but also shifts well when the film finally, finally, allows him to act like a human being.

Despite this problem in timing, Followed is one hell of a thrill ride, cleverly constructed and staged, using the modern urban mythology surrounding the Cecil, creepypasta, and all kinds of modern quotidian fears and anxieties to find something, anything, to creep any given viewer out. It’s got ghosts, serial killers, creepy men in masks, strange changes in physical space, mental breakdowns, and so on, and so forth. Add to that the film’s ability to make even somewhat implausible plot twists fun in a properly macabre way, and you have one highly entertaining horror movie.