It Follows: A Film Divided

In my opinion, one of the strongest elements of a good horror film is mood, atmosphere, “vibe,” whatever you want to call it. The stronger the mood, the easier it is to lead the audience where you want them to go emotionally, making even slight gestures lead to strong reactions. And a big part of evoking mood is having a coherent, well-considered style to the film. When everything - acting, dialogue, sound design, scoring, and cinematography - works together toward a singular vision, it does a lot of heavy lifting, usually to much more interesting results than indiscriminate gore and screaming.

That last bit, however, is important - it needs to be working toward a singular vision. When it doesn’t, even the most carefully designed and composed film can end up a bit of a mess. Pick the story you want to tell, and tell that story, and make sure every element contributes to that story, and not another one.

It Follows is a carefully designed film, and it starts strong, but doesn’t quite know what story it’s trying to tell, and lands with much less impact as a result.

The film opens on a quiet nighttime suburban street, and a young woman running out of a house. She runs out into the street, a neighbor asks if she’s okay, and she says yes, but she’s obviously not, She circles back around to her car, gets in, and drives as far away as she can. We cut to her sitting with her back to a lake’s edge, lit by her car’s headlights. She’s on her phone, leaving a message for her father. She’s telling him how much she loves him, and apologizes for all of the times she caused him trouble. She’s talking like she’s never going to see him again.

And then a sudden cut to day, and her broken body, dead eyes staring up into the sky.

And then our protagonists - Jay, her sister Kelly, and their friends Paul and Yara. They’re hanging out, as teenagers do, just another lazy evening. Jay’s got a date with this new boy she’s been seeing. Paul seems to feel some type of way about it, but doesn’t say anything. It’s all very low-key. Kelly, Paul and Yara hang out and watch a movie, Jay goes on her date. They go to the movies as well. And then go park the car somewhere secluded, and do what teenagers do when they go park the car somewhere secluded.

Only for Jay to wake up, chloroformed and tied to a chair. Jay’s new boyfriend needs for her to see something. It’s walking toward her. And we know from the opening what will happen if it reaches her.

As it transpires, Jay has inherited a curse. Her boyfriend got it from a one-night stand, and he’s passed it on to her. If she has sex with someone else, she’ll pass it on to them, and so on. Until she does, she’ll be stalked by a ghost, of sorts. It can look like anyone, and only people who carry the curse can see it. It’s coming for her, slowly but surely. She can run, she can drive, but it will find her eventually. If she dies, it will come for her boyfriend, so passing it on doesn’t really solve the problem, it just forestalls it.

Jay is understandably traumatized (and acts it, which is rare in horror films), and so she and her friends attempt to keep her safe, all the while trying to figure out how to undo this horrible thing that has happened to her, and from which she cannot escape.

It’s a pretty compelling premise on its face - you can’t avoid it, you can’t hide from it, and you will die when it reaches you, and the best option you have is to find someone to have sex with, knowing that by doing so you’re basically passing on a death sentence. It’s actually a pretty unsettling twist on the whole “teens who have sex get murdered first” tradition in slasher films, and embodying it in a lone figure who might look perfectly normal, slowly walking toward you in the background, or out of a crowd, or down a hallway lends the whole thing a feeling of paranoia similar to that mined in films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The camerawork does a great job of communicating this. The film is very carefully composed, there aren’t many closeups, and a lot of the work is done with long shots, distant figures barely glimpsed, small figures placed in really wide shots. Positioning a slowly walking figure either in the center of the shot or in the background creates a understated visual vocabulary for when someone is in danger. The threat is established early in the opening sequence, so the rest is awful implication - the audience knows what happens when it catches up, so seeing it coming is bad enough. The sound design is largely ambient, with low-frequency tones punctuating moments of danger, and isn’t at all intrusive. A lot of thought went into presentation here.

Sometimes, though, maybe too much. The stylistic approach taken with its setting feels like it pulls against the spare, effective minimalism of the premise. This feels very much like a film out of time - it’s set in Detroit and its outlying suburbs, and the Rust Belt setting keeps it grounded, and naturalistic. These look like real neighborhoods and real homes and real schools. The setting and a synthesizer-heavy soundtrack locates the film in the late 70s or early 80s, feeling similar to the original Halloween without being too self-consciously retro. Or would, if it weren’t shot through with anachronism. The young woman at the start calls her father on a cellphone, but nobody else in the film seems to have one, and the protagonist’s homes still have old rotary wall phones. The kids watch movies (1950s science fiction movies, at that) on old CRT televisions, but then Yara spends the movie reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot on something that looks like a Kindle built into a makeup compact. Jay’s movie date is at a theater where the film is accompanied by live music played by an organist

This isn’t “oh look, the Roman soldier is wearing a wristwatch” negligence, this is a deliberate choice by the director in an effort to create a dreamlike atmosphere (at least, according to IMDB). But it doesn’t, not really - it’s tough to really nail that mix of present and past, and here it ends up being more jarring and distracting than anything else. The naturalistic setting pulls us into the world, but the odd atemporality pulls us right back out again.

This extends to the scripting and acting choices as well. The dialogue is largely naturalistic - these teens are not super-glib or witty, they’re fumbling, sometimes inarticulate, like actual teenagers are, and that’s good. That works with the setting. But then there’s just a little more air in the dialogue than you would expect - pauses in conversation are a little long, everything feels a little slow and quiet, almost languid, and though it works well at the beginning to set up the world of these kids as one largely absent of tension, it persists even after the threat has been made clear - there really aren’t many emotional peaks or valleys in this film, and  this ends up robbing the film of energy it needs to really sell the danger that Jay is in.

On sort of a related side note, the world of this film is one in which adults barely exist, mostly seen from a distance or heard from off-screen. Even though it appears to be set during the school year, the five teenagers at the heart of the movie pretty much move around without any restriction or apparent concern from their parents, and before shit really gets bad, it has the idyllic feel of summer vacation, even when it’s gray and autumnal outside. All of this leads to a feeling that this is a world out of time and season, which would be fine except that again, it feels like it’s not working in concert with a relatively gritty setting or a premise that requires tension. 

I mean, oddly enough, what a lot of this brings to mind is Napoleon Dynamite, in terms of setting and feel, and that’s…really, really not a horror movie.

There are some other missteps as well - making the spirit invisible but still physical leads to a couple of slightly dodgy effects sequences, including a climactic showdown between the spirit and the kids that just feels goofy and somewhat contradictory to the film’s internal logic (which the director has said was intentional, but it ends up making the threat feel less threatening), and I feel like the central conceit - you pass this curse on by having sex with someone - went underutilized, considering it existed right alongside the sexual politics of adolescence - especially unsupervised adolescence.

These characters are at a point in their lives where they’re just now exploring feelings of attractiveness and desire, and through no say of their own, it’s now coupled with life-or-death stakes, but it never really seems to matter or connect. Paul is the prototypical Nice Guy from jump - he’s jealous of Jay’s new boyfriend, pretty creepy in his own right, and his ideas for helping Jay are pretty clearly just expressions of entitlement, and it’s addressed, but only a little, and only in passing. Jay’s boyfriend observes that it’ll be easy for Jay to pass it on because she’s a girl, and that seems like a great opportunity to dig into ideas about objectification and the presumed sexual availability of women, but again, it’s just sort of glossed over on the way to something else.

There are a couple of feints toward what I thought would have been much better endings than the one we got - much more provocative, certainly, and more powerful in their implications, but what we’re left with instead is vaguely icky - a clumsy, reductive showdown, followed by the Nice Guy getting what he wanted all along, and nothing really changing, winding the film down in kind of an inconclusive mess. It’s incredibly frustrating, because it’s clear a lot of thought went into this film, but it really does feel like half of the choices made ended up sabotaging the other half, and what tension and dread we do get are squandered. It’s one thing to see what you want to do, it’s another to see it clearly.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon