It Follows...Slowly, Wonkily, Nonsensically.

Rating: 4/10 (3 January 2019)

First the good. There's a decent premise/concept: A disturbing human form phantasm/chimera passes from human host A to murderously (if incredibly slowly) stalk human host B after sex between A and B. The only way to arrest the menace is for B to pass it on to C - also through the act of intercourse. If C is killed by 'it', the pesky illusory menace returns to make life a headache for person B - so B has to find a D or die horribly. Or something like that. Also good - It's actually well shot, and lovingly captures suburban Detroit with some fine detail. Also good is its obvious homage to John Carpenter's Halloween, along with a fine, off-kilter score. Also pretty good - a decent and willing cast that handle the angst of teenage hood shifting to the dread of adulthood.
So that's the good out of the way.
Then there's the not so good. It's not really a horror in the traditional way - which is nothing to be ashamed of - but it's neither particularly scary or in anyway satisfying if it's trying to be a psychological horror, promising and intriguing prologue aside.
Given the premise of the film (and the early buzz raving about it), I was expecting something at least on a par with the original Ring - a film that is properly freaky. But It Follows settles for neither intensely freaky/disturbing or all out nightmarish scares.
You just sit there waiting for the scares to arrive and the 'It' needle barely registers close to mildly creepy. As the camera moves, you find your eyes wandering into the background to see if you can spot anything that will give you sleepless nights for a week only to find there is n-o-t-h-i-n-g there. There's no Mulholland Drive freak you out Bonnie Aarons behind the dumpster, no Don't Look Now Adelina Poerio in a red raincoat. If you're going trope hunting - this ain't that film. No psycho in a William Shatner mask either. Sorry.
Probably the most disturbing thing about It Follows is it's resolute refusal to make any real sense as it assiduously and deliberately avoids to cow-tow to the requirements to make a film genuinely memorable or scary. Explanations are treated with disdain, logic is given short shrift, there's absolutely no attempt at a real time revelation, and an utterly and woefully ambiguous ending that comes across as nothing more than one of those dreadful decisions by a director to 'make it more fun' and missing by planetary distance.
The only reason why I think a lot of critics liked this film so much is on account of exactly what the director didn't do and given him a of huge amount of latitude in producing a film that could be interpreted as something that it patently is not. In film critic's universe - this is called original or imaginative or fresh. But in avoiding entirely the A-Z of 'How To Scare The Living Hell Out Of Me' - the film pretty much throws out the entire language required do precisely that.