It Follows

March 22, 2015 at 7:12 pm | Posted in 2015 | 2 Comments
Tags: David Robert Mitchell, Horror, Keir Gilchrist, Lili Sepe, Movie Review

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This perfectly titled film is the creepiest fun I have had at the movies in years. Since maybe “The Others,” in fact. Wisely leaving behind the slasher motif that has grown so tired in the American horror genre, second time director, David Robert Mitchell, takes us gleefully back to the days of classic Hitchcockian horror, while slyly nodding at the golden age of horror in the 1980s. During the height of AIDS-anxiety, those films were all morality tales with only thinly veiled allusions to the idea that impulsive teenage sex can kill you. Mitchell, in a stroke of genius, simultaneously makes that allusion overt and inverts it entirely. The resulting premise is winkingly sardonic and the audience seems in on the joke. When the opening scene features a terrified teenage girl in a negligee and candy-red pumps, Mitchell has made clear his intentions to riff on (and gently mock) familiar tropes. But beyond all of this sly winking, there is also a chillingly creepy film. The evil in this story comes slowly and ever unrelentingly toward its victims. It never stops; it just patiently follows. Under Mitchell’s directions, that leads to some beautifully chilling scenes. He has a keen eye for the techniques of horror film making: his camera angles, lighting, scene structure and use of music all build tension almost unrelentingly. The score, in particular, effectively kept the audience on edge, even in seemingly benign scenes. But this was what made the film a truly effective horror movie: the way it so successfully reframed innocent moments as potentially terrifying. It was not without flaws. Characters sometimes behaved in those same, stupefyingly idiotic ways they often do within this genre. The teens’s parents were ridiculously absent as all manner of death and terror unfolded. And the climactic scene did not quite live up to its build up, though, to be fair, this is not an easy task and one does not go to a horror film just to see how it ends up. It’s all about the journey and this one was delightfully chilling from the first scene to the final one.