It Follows: Movie Review

While artistically intriguing, It Follows has scares few and far between.

If you've heard the hype surrounding It Follows, then you're already dead. The story follows a young lady, who has just had a strange sexual experience, being tormented by a shapeshifter. The film is a large metaphor for one-night stands, with the shapeshifter being the shame that follows. Basically, if you want your kids to stay abstinent, have them watch this film.

It Follows tries too hard. While the music is beautiful and reminiscence of horror classics, it plays like a broken record every five minutes and becomes annoying half-way through when the story suddenly slows down. Synthesizers fill the air, really trying to bring a sense of horror to scenes where the main characters are eating lunch.

Director, David Robert Mitchell has a lot of fun with camera angles, but ultimately fails at directing cinematographer Mike Gioulakis. Every other shot the camera pans to some random door, house, or cloud in the sky. Almost every shot between the pans becomes random zooming on other useless everyday items, or faces of expression that have nothing to do with the story. But, each shot is beautiful and that's David Robert Mitchell's largest failure. The camera never suggests horror, which causes the music to overcompensate and everything else falls apart from there. 

The music and camera work might be the foundations for this film, but other little pieces make the film collapse. Rarely anyone dies or is in danger besides the main protagonist. Dialogue is sparse and builds the bare essentials for character. The shapeshifter seems to be invincible since this is all just a metaphor for something that happens to billions of people everyday. The characters are given too much information about their threat at the beginning of the story that it leaves empty space for filler scenes. 

It Follows has its moment, but not enough to satisfy or stay original. The foundations of the film over compensate and turn the film into more of a knock-off than a future horror classic. 

D

Good Qualities: Beginning, ending. Some good camera work.

Bad Qualities: Camera always trying to be perfect, music overcompensating for lack of story and horror.

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