Simple premise unfolds in beguiling fashion in It Follows
There’s a filmmaking lesson to be found in the title of this supremely effective horror from writer-director David Robert Mitchell, one that applies to all genres: Simply set up an effective and arresting premise, then let the plot play out by the rules you’ve created. Successful storytelling? It follows.
The film’s basis is simple: What if the ‘D’ in STD stood for demon? That’s what Jay (Maika Monroe) discovers after the first time she has sex with her new boyfriend (Jake Weary). What’s transmitted isn’t a disease but a kind of condition, apparently incurable.
As the boyfriend explains (shortly before he disappears — seems he only wanted her for one thing), Jay is now being tracked by a relentless, supernatural killer. Only its victims can see it. It can look like anyone, friend or foe or stranger. It will walk calmly toward its prey, but it will never stop. Imagine a mediumspeed zombie, but fixated only on you.
If it kills her, it will then go after the now-missing boyfriend. Her only hope, he tells her, is to pass it along to someone else and hope they do likewise. So there’s an element of another old terror staple, the chain letter. Send it to someone else, or something bad will befall you.
Maika is at first skeptical, but several near brushes with the thing convince her it’s for real. She enlists the aid of her sister (Lili Sepe), her torch-carrying pal Paul (Keir Gilchrist) and the neighbourhood ne’er-do-well (Daniel Zovatto), who among other things has a car and access to a cottage outside the city.
Such a simple storyline would suggest — perhaps even invite — a similarly unexceptional filming style, but part of what makes It Follows so beguiling is the care and craft that went into it. Fashions and vehicles suggest a 1980s setting, and the characters watch even older movies on TV, but there are modern elements as well: Jay’s sister is reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot on an e-reader that looks like a makeup compact.
Then there’s the sound design, ranging from nearsilence to freight-train and wind-tunnel noises that practically assault the listener. The score is an electronic mix that sounds as though the Vangelis music from Blade Runner had been remixed by the team behind The Shining.
The weirdness continues with the cinematography, which includes the occasional hand-held (and one wheelchair-held) camera, but mostly involves rock-steady, wide-angle shots that have us peering into the distance to try to glimpse something we know is out there, coming.
Monroe is an appealing audience surrogate, adding to the list of strong female characters in horror films of late. (See also The Babadook, The Cabin in the Woods and last year’s thriller The Guest, which coincidentally also starred Monroe.)
Frightened yet resolute, she’s trying to reason her way out of this mess while rebuffing the virginal Paul, who offers to receive the curse from her — a sacrifice with benefits, as it were. For once, the age- old horror-movie metaphor of sex equals death is played straight, without winking or irony.