Thursday, August 27, 2015

La Femme Recommends...It Follows




It Follows is a terrifyingly simple premise for a horror movie.  You have sex, and unbeknownst to you, you have contracted something.  From them on, there is something following you, or more accurately, someone.  It never runs, only walks to you in a slow, unrelenting gait.  If it touches you, it kills you.  It can look like anyone, someone you know, a stranger, scary or benign.  How do you kill it? Well you can't.  But you can pass it on to someone else by having sex with them.  Of course, if they die, it comes right back to you.

David Robert Mitchell takes this simple premise and makes It Follows a tight, taut and eerie film.  Right after K and I finished the movie, I got all existential: what did it all mean?  Was it a metaphor for AIDS? A warning against promiscuity?  The opposite?  K laughed at me and said, maybe there wasn't a metaphor.   But to say that It Follows isn't about sex and love and its consequences feels wrong to me, so maybe its about fear and vulnerability and the unknown when you open your self up to another person.  The film is cool but never detached but the mystery stays a mystery which I really loved.  The It is never explained, it just is. Like love and human connection and attraction, IT can't be explained and it is an unstoppable force.

Jay (Maika Monroe, so natural), lives in suburban Detroit. She is attending a community college and she is dating a fellow student, Hugh.  He seems sweet and charming and she has sex with him in his car next to an abandoned apartment building.  Things go south quickly when he chloroforms her and she ends up tied to a wheelchair in a parking garage.  That's when he explains the rules to her, described in the first paragraph.  And eventually we see a naked woman in the distance, slowly walking towards them.  He drops her off at home saying to her, Have sex with someone. Quick.

She is traumatized but of course, skeptical.  Until It starts following her, sometimes as someone she knows like her grandmother, sometimes like a monster man with no eyes.  What I loved about this film was the atmosphere.  See, I realize that I profess to hate horror but I love it when its well done.  I don't' like to watch scary movies but when I read about something interesting or especially atmospheric, I can't help it, I want to see it.  What It Follows does so perfectly is set an incredibly uneasy tone.  The first moments of the film may be the scariest of them all, and it perfectly sets the atmosphere and tone for the rest of the film.

The cast is strong: I saw Maika Monroe in The Guest, a few months ago.  That is a dirty, little, twisty film and she was the moral compass of the film, like she is here.  She was compelling and lovely and innocent all at once.  Her friends are also uniformly strong with Paul (Kier Gilchrist) standing out the most.  He has a crush on Jay, but he isn't the like the handsome, strong guys we see her attracted to.  It's hard to explain but he is both incredibly strong and resoundingly weak in this film.  The kids have a real camaraderie, none of that cruelty or nastiness of so many teenagers in horror films.   They seem natural and organic, the film could easily have been a drama about this group of friends.

I also love the setting of Detroit.  The Great American City, dead: maybe thats the metaphor, somehow.  This city that was once great and that hopes to be great again, but in the moment is poisoning itself.  The neighborhood Jay lives in seems abandoned, left to rot.  Still quiet and safe seeming overall, but sinister too.  And the more unseemly elements, the burnt out high rises and hookers, creeping in to their idyllic suburban life.

Of course, It is a metaphor for death, always coming for us from somewhere, relentlessly, slowly but at every moment we are closer.  But I want to tease out something else: I think It is also about morality.  I don't mean it's conservative, instead I mean that Jay made her choices about sex and love for herself in the beginning of the film, she was unencumbered.  She had sex with Hugh because she liked him and she wanted to.  Once she knows the "cure" for It, she doesn't immediately do why the viewer might.  We think, drive far away, get on a plane, have a lot of sex with promiscuous people! We try to cure it, solve it. Jay tries to solve it too, but she doesn't like the solution.  Because now, sex, is inflicting something on her partners.  Sex becomes something deeply moral, does she want to get rid of It, yes, but does she want to inflict in on others, no.  Love and sex become less and less entwined, but also more and more entwined.  

It Follows isn't particularly gory or full of onscreen deaths.  In fact, the body count is fairly low for a horror movie.  But the stakes are still incredibly high for the characters both emotionally and physically.  Jay has sex with Hugh because she likes him.  Once he passes It on to her, she has to decide who to have sex with in a completely different way than she ever expected.  Paul cares about her and offers to have sex with her because he thinks he finally has a shot with Jay.  She rejects him because she doesn't feel that way about him, later in the film, once their relationship has changed (its done subtly and with great depth) she doesn't want to because she does love him.  I think that the way Mitchell uses the trope of passing It on sexually with great ease.  And he does so much off screen and so much by implication.  One simple shot of  Jay looking out onto a boat with three boys on it says so much and is so devastating.  Mitchell manages to imbue so much meaning into such small moments.  And that last shot, whoa. It hits you like a ton of bricks.

Julie

1 comment:

  1. Betway Mobile Casino App - JTHub
    It's the app for iPhone and Android that you can use 통영 출장샵 when you're a new customer. It's easy 영주 출장샵 to download and 강원도 출장안마 install, 진주 출장샵 and comes with a 하남 출장안마 wide range of payment options

    ReplyDelete