More Than Lives Up to the Hype

Rating: 8/10 (7 July 2016)

I was excited going into this movie. I had heard great things about it: it was scary, it was retro-styled, and the score was great. There also seemed to some backlash against it, with others saying it was boring and overrated. Luckily this movie, like The Babadook and The Witch, lives up to the hype instead of being a pretentious bore. These three movies are frequently championed as the best modern horror has to offer, and It Follows is my favorite of the three.
The movie opens with a teenage girl running out of her house and down the street like something is chasing her. Right away Halloween's influence is apparent: the empty streets, tall trees, and quiet neighborhood bring Haddonfield to mind. Bucking the trend of there being no help, a concerned neighbor asks if the girl is alright. She refuses help, runs back into her house, and drives off in her car. She sits alone at the beach, her headlights casting a circle of safe light around her. Cut to her dead body, leg twisted back at the knee. Never once is the danger is seen, but it is definitely felt.
Like in Halloween, the characters in It Follows are always being, well, followed, and the cinematography does a great job capturing this feeling. One particular shot comes to mind. The camera remains stationary as Jay and her sister (or friend?) walk into her house. It feels exactly like a stalker stopped in his tracks to watch them go inside. The synth score, while not as melodious as Halloween's, made the tension and scares stronger. Once Jay learns the premise of the monster, the tension never lets up. None of the scares fail, and I don't remember any jump scares. The characters are good friends and never succumb to dumb horror clichés. The acting is good, and the cinematography is breathtaking at times.
I only have a few complaints. The scene where Jay contemplates sleeping with three men on a boat doesn't sit well with me. She stripes and walks into the water, and it cuts to her driving. Her hair is wet, so we know that if she didn't sleep with them, she at least got close. I just have a hard time seeing how the scene would go if she slept with them. Just earlier she seemed really unsure of passing it along to someone else, and while doing it to a stranger is easier, it also seems more immoral, and Jay seemed like she wanted to do the right thing. Also, how many of the men did she sleep with? Having sex with three random guys at once seems a little hard to by, and I would think those men would be more than a little suspicious of a girl willing to do that. If she just slept with one, then where did the other two guys go? Later she sees a the thing following her as a naked man on her roof. That could have been a guy on the boat, but we never see their faces clearly. Jay's face driving reveals nothing, which would be strange if she had just had sex with any of them. Something about this scene just doesn't seem right. One poster on the message boards said Jay should have been crying, that way each possibility would seem more likely. I agreed with that, but then I wondered the point of making this scene ambiguous at all. The rules of the game aren't revealed until twenty minutes in, and although it isn't that late, it's late enough that I think it should have been kept as a surprise.
After Jay and Paul have sex (a cold scene), they walk hand in hand down the sidewalk. Then it ends. My first thought was, "That's it?!" But then I thought about it and, while maybe not perfect, it was a fine ending. Paul finally gets his dream girl, Jay has romance, they can help each other, and the thing still follows (possibly). This is ambiguity done right. When they fought the thing in the pool earlier, the pool filled with blood, something it had never done before. Maybe that meant it was dead, but no one really knows, and they'll never know unless they catch someone following them. The last shot shows someone walking down the sidewalk much further behind Jay and Paul. Is this "It?" It's a great question, and I like that it ends with this uncertainty. There's a theory out there that Jay and Paul are dead in this scene, but I can't think of any evidence to support this theory. The director put in objects from different time periods to make the movie feel like a dream. I can't wait to watch it again to look for these things, and to try to find deeper meaning, of which I'm sure there's plenty.