David Robert Mitchell
It Follows

Critiquing a film that has been particularly lauded, if not outright trumpeted, is not an easy task. For It Follows, the poster alone, adorned with stars from top reviews, suffices. Yet, I still want to share my thoughts, deviating partly from the chorus of praise.

I quite liked the film. I found it stylistically delightful and mature, bringing a different kind of horror energy from that crystallized in thousands of cookie-cutter films. The director here wisely opposes the extreme dynamism of clichés with maximum slowness. The threat, the mysterious enemy to escape from, appears only a few times by surprise in tight spaces; in most cases, we see it approach slowly from afar, inexorable and silent. This results in a different kind of anguish from the usual, devoid of major adrenaline bursts; instead, the viewer is left to stew in a suffocating sense of helplessness. The "thing" eventually arrives; despite the protagonist's constant movements, the threat looms over her like a sword of Damocles. It aims to wear her out. The viewer undergoes the same exhausting psychological torment.

The grueling slowness of the story has a valuable ally in Disasterpeace’s music, which masterfully fills the film’s otherwise excessively stretched moments. The composer's work is excellent, full of memorable, engaging, and well-paced themes, characterized by a certain emotional urgency, an immediate and highly effective emotional charge. The pervasive presence of the music says a lot about the stylistic approach the director Mitchell wants to give to this film: fear is highly aestheticized, brought into focus with great aesthetic emphasis, perhaps also to compensate for a medium-low level narrative.

So, there can be no complaints about the style and basic dynamics of the film. It’s the narrative that doesn’t always fully convince: after setting up very solid premises, it prefers to follow an almost purely action evolutionary line, rather than systematically developing the moral and psychological consequences of such a situation.

This curse is transmitted sexually; this could have been better exploited to sketch out a moral issue on the matter. Instead, the protagonist Jay doesn’t seem very worried in this regard, she doesn't ponder too much whether it’s right or wrong to infect others. Lacking (incredibly) any parental figure, these kids are left to themselves and entirely without guidance: the resulting view of society is too simplified and serves solely to make the diegetic mechanism work.

Even the anguish created by the persecution isn’t always used to the most advantageous effect; when Jay is at the peak of danger (in the hospital), variations are introduced that relieve the pressure on her. But overall, the final part seems to demonstrate that director and screenwriter Mitchell had some good insights but then failed to bring them to full fruition. The rules of the curse are also unclear or at least not very sensible (I won’t spoil anything about the being’s physicality and mortality, but they didn’t convince me).

The very last shot, however, is good, playing best with the uncertainty of the situation. That’s where all the inventive efficacy lies: like the young protagonist, we’re no longer sure if the passersby are common people or one of the many incarnations of the malevolent thing. It’s a pity this ambiguity is so little exploited in the rest of the film, given that the various incarnations of the thing are (almost) always recognizable. And indeed, one of the best sequences shows the thing embodied in a normal person, barely distinguishable from Jay’s friends.

6.5/10