Missed Opportunity

Rating: 5/10 (15 March 2015)

'It Follows' is frustrating in ways it is difficult to explain without giving away the plot. Suffice to say it takes the connection between Sex & Death in American teen-centred horror movies to a far more literal end than usual. Writer-Director David Robert Mitchell borrows a lot from '80s and early '90s – Carpenter's over-use of suburban steadi-cam and Lynch's love of the perfectly framed symmetrical establishing-shot and overlong extreme close-up, with occasional Cronenberg-like fascination in incidental details. The soundtrack – a smattering of discordant synthesized chords, whines and pops – is distinctly retro: retro Carpenter at his least musically imaginative. To its credit, it takes its time, establishing tension gradually, rather than leaping from one bloody set-piece to another in rapid succession, and there are occasional sparks of visual inventiveness. A shame, then, that so much of the cinematography is derivative. . It's trying to do something interesting with the trope of the relentless inhuman predator, but largely fails. Partly this because it is too mainstream for the art- house crowd and too arty for the multiplex (those people want more gore). The who, why and what of the predator are completely avoided, which adds to the tension and anxiety of the characters – of whom only Maika Monroe, the female lead, seems emotionally invested in proceedings – but makes the internal-logic of the horror franchise (and you just KNOW this is going to be a franchise) difficult to fathom.