It Follows
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Starring: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi
100 mins; Class 18;
KRS Releasing Ltd
There is much to like about It Follows, a horror film that eschews blood and guts and cheap clichés for a more intelligent approach to its story with a solid ensemble cast of unknowns giving their all.
It arrives on a wave of critical acclaim, having made a splash at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, and currently enjoying a 96 per cent positive response on website review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
I admit to being slightly less enthusiastic on the whole; as the story, while having a very interesting premise, kind of peters out towards the end and it doesn’t offer a solid resolution… may-be this will be left for the inevitable sequel.
Maika Monroe stars as Jay, a 19-year-old college student who has struck up a relationship with Hugh (Jake Weary), yet after their first sexual encounter things become a little sinister not to say very scary. Hugh’s behaviour changes radically and Jay begins to feel a strange presence, while feel-ing that someone is constantly following her.
Enlisting the help of her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and their friends Yara (Olivia Luccardi), Paul (Keir Gilchrist), and Greg (Daniel Zovatto) the group endeavours to find out more about this being, clearly supernatural in nature, as it ominously gets closer and closer to her.
It comes as a great relief that It Follows features no ‘found film footage’ gimmicks, the story itself being told in a completely linear fashion as it opens with a rather dramatic scene of a woman desperately running away from a house to the beach where she tearfully phones her father. She is found rather gruesomely murdered the next day.
Performances are solid throughout
The script by writer/director David Robert Mitchell has some interesting things to say about sex (that the being is transferred from one human to another via sexual intercourse is very tell-ing) and he creates an unsettl-ing nightmarish scenario that permeates throughout.
The performances are solid throughout, the entire cast adding depth to what would ordinarily be stereotypical victims of a vicious stalker killer with Monroe’s Jay the standout.
Production wise, there are some nice touches, what with the ethereal quality of the cinemato-graphy and the innovative production design.
Mitchell also takes a less is more approach; quite happily taking his time to tell the story. This does ratchet up the tension somewhat, but at moments risks getting languid.
Moreover, I feel more should have been said about the curse than that is passed on through sex; and it deserves more exposition than it ultimately gets; leaving me with the feeling that although It Follows is very well made, a little depth is lacking in the storytelling department.