It Follows

It Follows (15)

USA 2014 100 mins  Dir: David Robert Mitchell  Starring: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Jake Weary, Daniel Zovatto, Linda Boston, Heather Fairbanks, Ruby Harris

Brilliantly simple and superbly executed, David Robert Mitchell’s low budget follow-up to his little-seen teen comedy The Myth of the American Sleepover is the creepiest horror flick to come our way since The Babadook.

It opens in trad horror movie style with a terrified girl in her underwear being stalked and done for in a grisly manner by an unseen assailant. Enter blonde teen Jay (Monroe), who’s clearly being set up as the next victim. After she succumbs to the sexual advances of new boyfriend Hugh (Weary), she’s suitably alarmed to find herself drugged and tied to a wheelchair while he explains what’s going to happen next. He’s just passed on the mother of all STDs: a malign spirit that only she can see, which will pursue her relentlessly. It could disguise itself as a friend or a stranger, but either way it won’t stop until she’s dead. She can outrun it temporarily, but the only way of ridding herself of the curse is to pass it on by shagging someone else. And he’s not out of the woods himself. If the spirit kills Jay, it’ll come gunning for him again as it works its way back down the line. So it’s in his interest that she should know what she’s up against.

From the cunningly ambiguous title onwards, It Follows is a smart, unrelenting, atmospheric treat. Carefully situated in run-down post-crash smalltown Michigan, the film’s curiously retro backdrop is underlined by teens who play card games, enjoy ’50s monster movies on boxy CRT TVs and go to watch the Cary Grant ‘trust no one’ flick Charade in a vintage picture house with a functioning Wurlitzer organ. Among the few pieces of modern technology we see is a shell-shaped Kindle on which one of Jay’s girl pals reads Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. This is the only part of the film where you feel Mitchell might be over-reaching himself. But genre buffs will enjoy his creative deployment of the popular curse motif, whose history stretches all the way back to M.R. James’s Casting the Runes, via Candyman and the Ring and Final Destination movies. He also plays with the familiar moralistic trope of punishing teens for having sex as well as its more rarely seen inversion, in which sex protects them from harm (Cherry Falls, anyone?). And what are those unstoppable, plodding Followers if not old-school zombies given a supernatural, shape-shifting makeover? Heightening the unremitting tension is the fact that they can adopt any form, keeping the audience on constant alert whenever a newcomer wanders into the background. The cleverness of this device is enhanced by cinematographer Michael Gioulakis’s long tracking shots and a frequently startling electronic soundtrack by Rich Vreeland, who calls himself Disasterpeace, which inevitably recalls John Carpenter’s Halloween score. It dips just a little in the final straight, but not before delivering the scariest swimming pool sequence this side of Let the Right One In.