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It Follows
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There is at least one sign of rigorous discipline in
contemporary horror cinema: David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. This clever, well-directed, minimalistic piece swaps
the traditional device of Todorovian hesitation (between two readings of a strange situation) for one of slow unveiling of an initial, supernatural
premise.
The film begins right inside this premise, without any
explanation of the frankly puzzling scene it shows: a very scared person runs
inside a house (the camera remains outside), then re-emerges, more scared; then
dives into another house opposite (same camera strategy), then flees that
dwelling as well. What can be going on?
Like in the Final Destination franchise (2000-2011), the characters in this narrative daisy-chain are beset
by a murderous malaise – a mysterious presence, spirit or entity – that they
progressively attempt to understand, unveil and combat. Eventually, they figure
out that it is a kind of curse that can (sometimes) be passed on to someone
else – especially via sexual contact.
Mitchell achieves something modest but quite
satisfying here. On the one hand, the supernatural plot device functions rather
like Alfred Hitchcock’s
attacking birds: it works as an open allegory onto which spectators (and
characters within the fiction) can project any number of interpretations (such
as – probably the most popular in this case – sex phobia in the era of AIDS).
It is pinned down neither to a rational or an irrational grid by the usual hesitation
game.
On another hand, the film evokes the wise phantom of
Jacques Tourneur: like Cat People or Curse of the Demon (1957), or indeed the
non-horror but religion-based Stars in My
Crown (1950), It Follows skilfully
identifies the “stalking presence” with the camera itself – and hence the very
apparatus of cinema. And so, in the final frames, no matter what we or the
teenagers in the film think we have figured out, that ever-floating presence
insists, in all its ghostly, disquieting reverberations …
Postscript August 2019: Enjoying It Follows prompted
me to catch up with Mitchell’s other work. Its predecessor, The Myth of the
American Sleepover (2010) is a delightful
teen movie. But the ambitious Under the Silver Lake (2018) is an overstuffed, pretentious, unbearable neo-noir
extravaganza, aiming for the cleverness, formalism and grace of P.T. Anderson
at his best, but landing in the backyard of Richard Kelly or Darren Aronofsky
at their worst.
© Adrian Martin September 2015 |
