Followers Keepers: Original Sin Meets Game Theory in It Follows
It Follows / directed by David Robert Mitchell
The basic premise of writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is crude and borderline-absurd, in the vein of any decent urban legend: if you have sex with the wrong person, a mysterious death-dealing creature will pursue you without respite, until you are done in -- unless you have sex with someone else, at which point the creature will turn its attentions to that partner first (kind of like a sexualized version of The Ring); but once it deals with him or her, it will return its deadly attentions to you. Oh, and this creature can take the form of any person, and simply walks in your direction until it gets you; only those who are its current or future targets are able to see its patient approach. Pulpy enough for you?
Yet this scenario is played out with high seriousness and decent helpings of dread in It Follows. Set in the Detroit suburbs, Jay Height (Maika Monroe) putzes around in her family’s above-ground swimming pool, chats with her younger sister Kelly (Lili Sepe), prepares to go on a date. Height seems to be a college freshman or thereabouts in age; from the longing glances she gets from her sister’s friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist) and the guy across the street, she’s a literal girl next door, desired and wholesome. The initial atmosphere is anticipatory, as if everyone’s just drifting along and waiting for life to happen.
Though what in fact happens is that Jay’s date goes horribly wrong. Hugh (Jake Weary) seems nice enough at first, but after they have sex in his car, Hugh chloroforms Jay and ties her to a chair in an abandoned building. He informs Jay of the curse that’s been passed on to her; in our first example of the scenario’s perversity, he also tells her that he’s chloroformed and tied her down for her own good, so that she can see that he’s telling the truth and will do what she needs to stay alive. He tells her he’s got a deep and abiding interest in her longevity, owing to the fact that the creature will hunt him once it’s done with her; he encourages her to sleep with someone else and thus pass the proverbial death’s head-embossed buck. And sure enough, as he’s talking, on the hillside below, a naked and blank-faced woman appears, who before long makes her way into the building and approaches Jay in an amble somewhere between zombie and drugged-out Manson acolyte. At this point, Jay may or may not believe in the curse, but is creeped out and deeply terrified by this unresponsive visitant. Before the woman can reach her, Hugh whisks Jay away, dropping her off in the street in front of her house, having successfully imparted his lesson.
Our heroine now encounters yet more layers of the curse’s perversity. Knowing the rules may help keep you safe, but they’re hardly a guaranty that you’ll survive - and if you want to try to survive, you effectively need to live in a state of constant paranoia. This is where some of the film’s quiet strength becomes apparent, as Jay’s friends, unsure of the reality of what’s going on, nonetheless band together to keep her safe - though, as events progress, we realize they may not be able to offer much more than moral support. The interplay between the characters has a nice natural feel to it; these are kids who know each other well and are happy hanging out, more or less doing nothing, even when they’re on the run from an untiring nemesis.
Jay’s sightings and evasions of the follower are consistently creepy, though to varying degrees, but only one or possibly two instances are terrifying. Indeed, the lack of consistency is one of the film’s major flaws: some of the appearances are nightmarish and vividly filmed, while others are pretty much slapping some makeup on a kid and having them walk slowly toward the camera. Still, tension is skillfully maintained by the way we are invited to scan the periphery of scenes for an oncoming follower; to state the obvious, this is a contrarian horror film, basing its menace on a slow-but-steady threat, not a lightning strike.
It Follows is at its strongest when the dreamlike, or I should say nightmare, experience is at its most gripping for both Jay and the audience. An early encounter with the creature in her house is the film’s most powerful sequence, combining Jay’s helplessness, the follower’s uncanny appearance, and both Jay and the audience’s struggle to grasp what the rules of the game are as it’s unfolding. That the sequence involves the violation of her home, even her bedroom, gives it a power that scenes in the outside world don’t quite muster. And the sense of threat begins to unravel when the dull implacability of the follower becomes more traditionally horror-movie like, snarling and even leaping in one scene. Our single glimpse of what happens when the creature actually reaches someone is eerie enough, but ultimately a deflating moment when measured against the unimaginable horrors on which its entire threat is based. Indeed, the more the basic premise of an eerie walker is departed from, the more the movie loses that special oomph that propelled it early on. And the final sequence, set in an abandoned swimming pool and involving the teens’ efforts to battle the creature, contains several missteps that savage the carefully-maintained tone of the film and feel silly, not to mention cliched.
The explicitly sexual nature of the curse’s transmission feels like a twist on the horror movie convention that a woman can’t get killed if she’s still a virgin (a notion toyed with in self-aware horror films like Scream and Cabin in the Woods) - It Follows affirms the premise, and then adds the cherry on top that if the woman then becomes even less virginal, aka slutty, she’ll be OK, or at least better off. There’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t quality to Jay’s situation that seems particularly resonant in terms of some baseline cultural assumptions about women’s sexuality. And the sexual dynamics around Jay and her male friends are part of the claustrophobic fabric of the film’s thematics. Paul nurses a long-time crush on Jay, and the boy across the street has a thing for her, too. There might be a slightly intentional, darkly comic element here in the fact that both guys want to, and do, sleep with Jay, despite the fact that they know it can kill them. Even if their motivations include altruistic reasons, i.e. transferring the curse from Jay to themselves, I think the film is clear that they are also unable to evade the sexual temptation in front of them.
Of course, I don’t want to lose sight of the film’s basic point that sex invites death, the way that sex and death are not linked unconsciously or symbolically but in actuality. A constellation of unsettling implications unfold: the curse removes the pleasure from sex, in the way that the cursee is compelled to do something that was previously pleasurable and spontaneous; the way that the afflicted is symbolically and probably actually murdering the person he or she is having sex with. The idea that one can choose to pass on the curse or not adds a dimension of ethical choice that ultimately seems like a test guaranteed to prove the inherent fallen state of mankind, and that only a saint could resist. This is hardly a religious film, but the taint of original sin does seem to lie upon its characters; in a twist that Satan would love, (temporary) redemption is just a kiss away.