Review: It Follows

David Robert Mitchell has made a horror film that excels at being scary even if the film contains some half-formed ideas. Underneath some of the best nightmarish imagery in years, It Follows delivers an oddly puritanical view on young teen sex. This viewpoint is the part that feels somewhat underdeveloped but I will get to that. First let's talk about the good.

After a great opening scene, It Follows is quick to get its plot rolling. Annie, a great Maika Monroe, is a young girl exploring teenage love. She has a date with boy one evening. The two have sex and all seems well until the boy knocks her out and ties her up. When Annie awakens, he tells her that he has passed an unknown force to her. This force is coming to kill her. It is slow but ever walking towards her. It can take the form of anyone to try to get close to her. Once it kills her, it will move to him and so forth down the line of sexual contacts.

First off, the premise is stellar. Boiled down to such simple elements, the film is nimble and ferocious. John Carpenter knew how to keep a plot simple in order to focus on the suspense and ratchet up the tension. Mitchell seems to be a student of Carpenter as he too understands this principle. When at its best, It Follows is a relentless nightmare.

However, once the film ends and the themes start to boil up the film feels less thought out. Mitchell easily creates a new monster, one I will never forget, but the film's message seems both heavy handed and slight at the same time. The anti-sex message is ever-present but it never seems to crystalize into a real point. Horror films have been punishing teenagers for having sex for decades but It Follows actually works the punishment into the rules of the plot. For all that effort and creativity you might expect the filmmakers to have a more concrete point. The film is too violent and exploitative to feel like it has the right to be this morally aggressive. In the end, the odd mix throws the film off just a bit and keep It Follows from being a classic. Curiously the soundtrack is also often all over the place and only occasionally hits the right mood for each scene. However on subsequent viewings, this ambiguity might serve the film well.

That being said, I do not want my criticism to stop anyone from seeing the film. It Follows is simply the scariest film of the year so far. It also contains enough ideas to keep you thinking about and coming back to the film in years to come. The film contains enough fodder for me to have nightmares for years about the monster this film creates. It Follows succeeds on so many levels that is deserves to be praised by horror fans. I will be interested to see what Mitchell does next as he clearly possesses a lot of talent and a ton of ideas.

4/5