It follows is a film that is creepy and intriguing, but sadly it's also repetitive and tedious

Rating: 5/10 (17 July 2015)

Jay Height (Maika Monroe) ends up being plagued by a mysterious curse following a sexual encounter. Jay finds herself being stalked by unknown entities that can only be seen by Jay or anyone who's been afflicted by the curse. These entities will try and kill Jay and the only way that she is able to stop them is by passing on the curse by sleeping with someone else.
This for me was a very mixed bag and there were good and bad aspects to this film which were pretty much in equal measure. I'll start off with the positive aspects....
The concept was original and fairly intriguing, it also was very creepy on several occasions. I was also pleasantly surprised at how the film generally avoided clichÃ©s and that the film also had very few cheap jump scares (there were one or two, but I think every horror film is allowed a couple of cheap scares). Given the premise involved, it would have been very easy to turn this film into a tacky sex romp, but the writers wisely try to focus more on the psychological effect that the curse had on Jay. The performances were also pretty good especially from Monroe in the lead role. The cinematography was good and the score was also used to good effect.
Now we'll move to the weaker aspects
Although the concept shows promise, the development of the story is quite poor. We're never really given any explanation as to where the curse came from. Despite the fact that it's a running theme throughout the entire film it's seldom discussed and the only reference we get is when the bloke that gave it to Jay said that some girl he met at the bar gave it to him - that's it. The characters themselves are rather shallow and the conversations that they share were dull and inane - this ultimately meant that I started to lose interest in the film when there were no entities pursuing Jay or any time when the focus was off Jay and the entities. Although the idea of Jay being hunted down by the entities is creepy at first it quickly becomes repetitive when you realise that they stalk her in exactly the same manner. In some ways it did make the second half of the film more tedious and less enjoyable than the first half and I think the only reason I didn't completely lose interest is because this film is relatively short.
There are other problems within the script such as how the entities stalk Jay; aside from on one occasion they always headed towards her in positions that made it easy for her to see them. If they wanted to kill her, why make it easy for her by allowing her to see them coming a mile off? Also why can't they just kill her during the 8 or 9 hours that she's asleep at night? It's also referenced early in the film that the entities can take on forms of people that the target knows in order to make it easier to kill them, but again this was only seen on one occasion. It would have made the film more creepy and more terrifying if we'd have seen more examples of this... It puzzled me that this excellent idea was established at the start, but never used for some reason.
I'm prepared to commend the film for being original and the concept is intriguing; the film is also very creepy at times and there were a couple of occasions where I did get a tingle down my spine. However, the repetitive nature of the narrative and some of the tedious dialogue and shallow characters do undo some of the stronger aspects and drag the film down making it a somewhat average affair.