A Pretty Unsettling Experience

Rating: 8/10 (26 April 2017)

Whoa! I just watched one of the creepiest/spookiest films I've seen in quite a while, 2015's "It Follows." This film has turned out to be a popular success, an instant cult item and a critical favorite, garnering great reviews all over the place...and for good reason. In the film, pretty Jay (the excellent young actress Maika Monroe) has a sexual encounter with her current boyfriend, only to soon learn that he has passed on a curse to her. She will now be relentlessly pursued by a demon/whatzit/something wherever she goes. This whatzit can assume any form and never hurries toward its prey; only walks steadily and with purpose. To have it catch up with you spells a pretty nasty death, as the film's opening scene shows us, with another pretty victim. The only way to get this curse taken off your back is to have sex with someone else, passing the curse on effectively. But if that next person is killed by the entity, the curse reverts back to you. OK, it might sound like a pretty outlandish basis for a film, but believe me, writer/director David Robert Mitchell makes the most of it, and turns his film into a masterful exercise in horror. This is the kind of film that you just KNOW will give you a nightmare eventually. The film contains any number of frightening scenes, despite the fact that there is little overt violence and barely any blood. In my favorite, the whatzit takes the form of an old woman in pajamas, who relentlessly follows Jay through the corridors of her high school. The demon thingy later takes the form of a hollow-eyed man, a half-naked woman, Jay's own father, and on and on. Monroe is terribly sympathetic and appealing in the lead, and she is ably abetted by her young fellow actors. The film has of course been seen as a metaphor for the AIDS virus, but can be interpreted in other ways, as well. Some see the whatzit as a metaphor for the fear and uncertainty that can ensue after a sexual encounter. Others have commented that the great unease engendered by this film can be attributed to the fact that things are never really explained, and that the central whatzit has no name, such as, say, Jason, or Freddy Krueger. The ending of the picture is quite ambiguous, too, and also open to interpretation. A pretty unsettling experience, over all, and one whose spell lingers after the final reel. And, oh...the film looks amazing in high def; almost painfully crisp and clean looking. Very highly recommended, indeed!