It Follows lays all of its metaphors out in the open, but rarely feels as if there’s no room for interpretation
I always like it when movies contain a line of dialogue that serves as a perfect review of the movie. It Follows does exactly that, with “it’s slow, but it’s not dumb.”
The movie has had so much buzz around it for so long, with some people calling it one of the best horror movies of the past decade, that I knew I was going to see it eventually. But it’s hung out in my periphery ever since, with a kind of dreadful certainty, just waiting until the time that I’d be in the right mindset to watch a horror movie that didn’t seem particularly “fun” in the slightest.
As it turns out, it’s very good. It’s absolutely a horror movie, but it plays out more like a suspense thriller: relatively bloodless and honestly not all that scary, but full of relentless tension and a kind of numb despair. The performances are all natural and completely believable. The soundtrack is perfect. It feels very much like an independent horror movie: not in that it’s low-budget, or in that it’s overly pretentious, but in that it feels as if the filmmakers had the freedom and confidence to do exactly what they wanted.
One thing I like in particular about It Follows is that it’s confident the audience will be able to figure out what’s going on without a ton of hand-holding. Some significant plot details are left ambiguous, mostly because knowing the specifics aren’t important to understanding the story. And while there are a few scenes with poems or quotes that are on the nose, they’re delivered as punctuation to themes that the movie assumes the audience has already figured out by that point.
It feels like a perfect introduction to cinema studies, which normally would be a severe insult, but here I mean as a compliment. When I had to take cinema studies, the most influential movie in my classes was Rear Window. Its theme of audiences-as-voyeurs seems like an obvious interpretation now, but for me, it completely changed the way I watch movies. I’m not claiming that It Follows will be the classic that Rear Window is, but it is excellent at inviting you to figure out its themes, while neither being too obtuse nor too direct.
There’s one scene in particular in which Jay and her friends are sitting in a field, listening to more details about how the entity works, and what are her options for escaping it. It’s a scene of exposition, functionally leading into the next act, but it doesn’t really play as one. Instead, the camera focuses on Jay โ who at this point seems numb to everything that’s happening to her โ as she picks individual blades of grass and lays them on her bare leg in rows. It’s a perfectly child-like thing to be doing, suggesting that she’s coming to terms with the fact that she’ll never be care-free again.
Once you pick up on the theme of the loss of innocence, the metaphors start coming fast and furious. Jay runs to safety on a swing set. A young man has left a well-used stack of porn magazines, the kind that Jay and Paul had been laughing about earlier. Two times, the gang runs for safety to a place that had been important to them as kids with their parents. And while we see the enemy frequently, it’s rarely made the focus, instead hanging out in the frame in a way that makes it feel not so much terrifying as it is inevitable.
In fact, a lot of It Follows feels like a (slightly) more bleak version of a Charlie Brown holiday special. The kids more or less fend for themselves, trying to make sense of things while the adults are rarely shown at all. That’s emphasized in the climax, where they come up with a plan that’s based on a sketchy understanding of how things work.
I don’t want to make it sound as if It Follows had no room for subtlety; it does, and its confident sense of style is what makes it work so well. I liked that for their date, Hugh took Jay to a screening of Charade. And I really liked how there was a mix of modern and dated throughout, with teenagers hanging out watching black-and-white movies on a CRT television in a very 80s-feeling living room, while one of them used a compact e-reader that doesn’t yet exist. Old and new cars co-existed without comment. Even the porn magazines seemed like the platonic ideal of 1980s porn (not to mention that a teenager in 2015 was still using printed magazines). The sense of timelessness gives it a feeling of universal nostalgia, the sense that no matter when you grew up, it looked and felt like this.
But mostly, It Follows invites you to interpret its meaning while staying just shy of spelling it out for you directly. I can understand audiences who were expecting something like Scream or, even more appropriate, Final Destination would be disappointed that it was so slow and relatively non-violent. But I liked that it told audiences how the monster works without (too) directly telling them what the monster means. It’s somehow not all that scary, and simultaneously full of dread about the most primal fear there is.
