David Robert Mitchell
It Follows

This review aims to be a sort of spin-off/prosecution of Joe Strummer's review and the snes-already-nes/lukemccaine quarrel about the horrors.

It's full of SPOILERS, as it's intended for the three mentioned above who have seen it; the others, DO AS YOU PLEASE.

Yesterday I watched It Follows.

What can I say, it's an intriguing film; I think I'll give it 3 stars but it would be 2.7.

It's a film full of THINGS.

The indie aesthetic. It means nothing; every year, dozens of indie films come out with dozens of different "aesthetics".

Does it have an "It follows" aesthetic? It tries, but it's more like a costume it puts on, adorning itself in a makeshift way, gathering increasingly discordant trinkets.

A good prologue reminiscent of "Martyrs" and that closes in a "convincing" way for the genre.

You raise my expectations then, big mistake.

There's this curse, a half-demon, a little monster, something follows you - it follows.

If you catch it, you'd better pass it on to someone else, hoping it will leave you alone afterward. To transmit it to another person, you have to sleep with them.

And so, a young man passes it on to a blonde girl, the protagonist. They make out in a car.

So far, so good.

But from now on, about 20 minutes in, it turns to the confused side.

The blonde is infected and begins to see a person following her, and when you say someone follows her, you might not get it. No, at a certain point, while the girl is at school in class, through the window, she sees an old woman on the street staring and slowly approaching her. You understand it's a presence because it's catatonic and because it walks just a bit faster than a zombie. You'll have understood that only she sees it, and so her classmates ask, "What's wrong with you, what's wrong?" And she screams, runs, and acts crazy, a classic.

The monster is slow? We aren't at a disco!

You have time to escape as it takes its time, occasionally turning back just to see how far it is? It’s not a video game! (And yet, unfortunately, it is).

The film goes on, and she occasionally sees the bogeyman, but it's not always the old woman; in fact, it CHANGES every time. A ruined, dirty, and worn-out girl with short shorts and mismatched socks, more zombie than the old woman, who wets herself.

A tall boy, cadaverously white with black-rimmed eyes. The evil followers suddenly appear in front of her, even inside the house while she's with her friends, and she acts crazier, yet her friends let her handle a gun.

In short, it's all so messy; even later, they go to the guy who passed on the chasing curse, and he gives the kids some tips on how to counter it here and there.

Consider that he, at the beginning of the film, after sleeping with her and passing on the AID-MONSTER, knocks her out with a chloroformed cloth, ties her to a chair in a dump to "explain" the curse to her, and then leaves her half-naked at her house, dropping her on the asphalt and skidding away into the night.

Then there's the final pool frenzy, the old radios and blow dryers being thrown into the pool to shock the monster while she, in the center of the pool, acts as bait, the blanket thrown over the head of the invisible monster (when it becomes invisible, it throws things at you with force, trying to kill you) so you see it (anyway, in the end, it was an anonymous man with a beard).

And so I told you a bunch of things but, as JS said, the writing is the worst part of the film. So what do you care?

You can watch it for the fear sequences (by the way, in the beach sequence, the monster changes twice: it's almost always an almost normal girl who walks at an almost normal speed, but for a moment when peering through the broken door, it's a nasty kid, like an orphan who roars like a lion to scare them, you see it for a second and then never again, but I used it as the film's poster, so now you can watch it as much as you like).

Fear. What is fear? What is fear to YOU? For snes, it's the jump-scare, the BOO! ...but that's a fright, it's like poppers. When I want to scare myself, I prefer discomfort, the paranoia of a bad trip, the shock, like The Tenant, or Inland Empire ...and even the old Orlok, I saw it for the first time at night on RAI3, I was 26 years old, I was very impressed (and amazed at the beauty of cinema but that's another story, I mean it's not a horror story).

The soundtrack. The soundtrack is nice, evocative, and derivative of soundtracks from genre films; it reminded me of The Exorcist, some Italian 70s thrillers, a splash of "silver". Yes, the soundtrack is quite seventies and varied, well balanced, and pleasantly fills sometimes suggestive sequences, from one scare to another.

Indie calls weird.

Is It Follows weird? It tries but it's more a let's make it strange, it's more a look now, eh? ...than a spontaneous or involuntary weird, in short, it's certainly not a 21st-century Coscarelli..

In conclusion, the film is quite well made but very poorly written, it got lost among the little monsters and became more of a horror video game than a horror film.

So even I cannot fathom the multiple accolades it garnered at the time. Perhaps it got lucky because, in its way, it is original and because it is full of THINGS.

https://www.debaser.it/david-robert-mitchell/it-follows/recensione