Visually terrific, but the basic idea is marshmallow nonsense

Rating: 5/10 (28 August 2015)

It Follows (2015)
Turbo review: great photography, lame premise. So it fits in with lots of lower budget horror films, scary and a little stupid at the same time. For some it will be scary enough to not matter—that's the point, right? And the cinematography is really very very nice.
It's also a male-gaze movie. Meaning that it has lots of young women with few clothes and the camera staring at them. Not sure if director/writer David Robert Mitchell is still working through puberty (his pictures show him very young, so it's not a stretch), but I found it a bit insulting and unnecessary. It cheapens the whole thing, even though it's a questionable quality of lots of horror films to demean the women in the story.
What works least is the main idea: some kind of force, not purely psychological, makes the victim see some kind of changeable person follow them. Everywhere. But always on foot, like a zombie. But with strangely fast and dangerous powers, too, whenever the scene requires. There is no rationale for this, no history, no nothing—it just happens to be the premise of the movie, and so there you have it. Let down your guard and like it, or question it (as I did) and get annoyed.
The acting is not bad, but that's putting it on some kind of low budget horror film scale. It's meant to be "normal" and it is, with some uneven performances. What does rise above is the visual panache, which is wonderful. It might actually be low budget, too, but it doesn't matter—cinematographer Mike Gioulakis makes the most of his digital camera rigs and over-the-top (not quite naturalistic) lighting. It's almost a requirement for students to watch for how to make the most out of simple equipment. Nice!
You'll have to decide whether this saves the movie. For me, there were just too many holes.