It Follows Review
By Colton Gomez | 04/11/24 | 1:46 P.M. Mountain Time
Horror, Mystery | Rated R | 1 hr 40 min | Film Release Date: March 27, 2015
“It Follows” is a movie I was at first frustrated with, then impressed by, then dissatisfied with, and now respect. David Robert Mitchell’s film touches on themes of growing up and death. The different ways people grow up, what they wish they would have done differently, realizing adulthood isn’t what they hoped it would be, growing apart and growing together. It forces its characters to confront their existence and the finality of death.
The story follows Jay (Maika Monroe), a college student who finds out she has contracted a sinister STD, which makes you the target for a slow but determined “It.” This creature is never explained, but we learn that it can take the shape of any person and likes to be naked. If it catches up to you, you die a horrible death. Jay takes some time to accept her new reality in which we see several close calls. Her high school sister and friends take time to become convinced that Jay is not crazy and is actually the target of an invisible stalker but help her and play along in the meantime. She can get rid of the disease if she passes it to someone else by having sex with them, but if they are eliminated, it continues down the chain of custody.
This is a film that cares about its characters, or at least its main character, Jay. Jay’s friends are fairly one-dimensional and forgettable. Jay herself isn’t all that special either, but it’s tragically fascinating to watch her feelings evolve over the course of the film. Her friends help her go from place to place, give her ideas of how to combat “it,” and all wait around drinking beer, watching tv, or playing cards until she decides to do something.
This isn’t a slasher film where we see gruesome deaths one after the other. No, it’s much more meditative than a slasher film. This film likes to pause with its characters, to see how they feel, how they’re processing the information. We see Jay’s sufferings in close up and see her feel somewhat emotionally dissatisfied after having sex with her boyfriend. We see her disappointedly reject an advance from a childhood friend, seeing his move as pathetic and uncaring. This creature forces Jay to confront her feelings of adulthood, intimacy, and death. Each close call, Jay becomes more unraveled in her ability to face death. She becomes paralyzed with the fear of being killed, which allows the creature to come far too close.
“It” is death personified. Death follows. Any stage of life can be interrupted by the sudden loss of life, which the film reminds us of each time the camera takes a moment to scan its surroundings. It shows us romance, tragedy, loneliness, death, adolescence, adulthood. The camera doesn’t like to show many middle-aged adults. It focuses on young adults, omitting the faces of cops, some parents, strangers. These are vague ideas of adulthood, professional grown-ups. These people are plagued with facing death too, and in a sense, have already faced it. We’re shown no enthusiasm on their part, no signs of life, sometimes just a disconnected voice, talking down at us.
Much of this film shows the aimlessness in which teens and young adults live out their lives. It shows the vague interpretation these young adults have about what it means to be an adult. Mostly, they just want to have fun and not take on any responsibilities. Several times, the characters will just be in a car, driving somewhere we don’t know about. They wind up someplace and continue from there. At one point, as the group is driving to a shutdown community pool, childhood friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist), is asked if he knows where to go, “I know how to get there…mostly.”
The film is very temporally ambiguous. It mixes retro with neo to the effect of feeling lost in time, not knowing your place in life. The group watches TV on a standard definition analog box that plays old black and white movies and newsreels about atomic bomb tests. Yara (Olivia Luccardi) reads Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” on her seashell phone and thematically reads passages from it. Cars from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s are all mixed together, buildings look old and rundown, and their movie theater has a live organist. The police officers wear modern uniforms, and the paramedics use modern ambulances. It can seem slightly jarring when you see these modern tools in the frame after being inundated with old references, forgetting where you are.
It’s a smart film in its ideas, themes, and technique, but the characters make dumb decisions which makes it hard to root for them sometimes. “It” only walks at a slow, constant pace, so it shouldn’t be that difficult to run from, right? This is where the movie loses me a bit. The characters are told that the creature is slow but not dumb. We know it can never run or go faster than a stroll’s pace. Yet, time and time again, the characters find themselves cornered.
The characters stay in one place for entirely too long, just so they can scream and run in a later scene. It’s not a hard creature to beat. All you have to do is stay ahead of it. If you stay in one place for too long, you will die. This creature can’t penetrate walls, but can use bricks to smash windows, and crawl in the house that way. This has to be the easiest movie monster to beat. Just walk slightly faster than it and you’ll die of natural causes. Or just mark its location, drive for a bit, calculate how much time you have before it can walk to your destination, and repeat. Or better yet, hop on a plane. Wall it in. There are so many options to mitigate or eliminate the danger this creature poses but our characters can only think to sit and wait. It really shouldn’t be that difficult to keep a sauntering grandma at arm’s length.
The other actors certainly serve the story, but Monroe is really shining here. She plays the part of a girl figuring out her life very well. She goes on dates, has sex, takes time to herself, spends time with her sister and friends. She’s a well-to-do girl who finds herself at the crossroads of life and death, betrayed by someone she thought she could trust. This makes her fall into a deep depression for the majority of the film but is offset with quiet moments that show the strength of her character, where she reminisces with friends and spends time with her sister.
The film is well-directed and makes great use of quiet moments. Mitchell can make a scene where a girl looks in the mirror and applies lipstick for about a minute interesting. He watches the character watch themselves. He lets the audience into the small parts of a person’s life. He allows them to be alone with themselves and shows those intimate moments that quietly build up their character. You can see the actors process information subconsciously in a blank stare, then snap back to look out the window or tell off some kid peeping toms. Mitchell makes it interesting to watch a character form a thought, which is the mark of an incredibly talented director.
The film is about death, something we all must face one day. Do you want to spend your life running? Shut in from the excitement and danger? Or do you want to keep moving forward in life, knowing that if you stop, your time will catch up to you?