2016-09-11

20160911: Fantasy Review--It Follows





Name: It Follows (2014)
IMDb: link to It Follows page

Genres: Fantasy  Country of origin: USA.

Cast:
Maika Monroe as Jay Height, Keir Gilchrist as Paul, Olivia Luccardi as Yara, Lili Sepe as Kelley Height, Bailey Spry as Annie, Jake Weary as Hugh, Daniel Zovatto as Greg.

Written and directed by: David Robert Mitchell.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
There is an opening, very short sequence about Annie, who is running from something.  She drives to a beach, then waits.  Next morning, she's dead.  Do we reconnect with this?

The film is about Jay Height, not Annie.  Jay grows closer to a boyfriend, Hugh.  They have sex at a remote place in the back of his four door sedan.  Then he drugs her, takes her to an abandoned car park, then ties her to a chair on rollers.  The boyfriend says that he's passed something on to her.  As they speak, a woman approaches.  The boyfriend gets agitated.  Unless Jay passes it on to someone else via sex, the whatever-it-is will come back for him.

Delineation of conflicts:
The police interview Jay.  They find the parking lot that Hugh took her to, chair she was tied to, her lost purse, and the apartment that Hugh said was his.

Jay seems to be followed by various characters.  Are they figments of her imagination, or is something real after her?  She has a difficult time showing anybody direct evidence of the followers, who seem to be reanimated dead.  Does that change?  Does she pass 'it' on to someone else?  Can she escape with the help of friends?  These are Jay's attempts to deal with the unknown.

Resolution: Jay finds that 'Hugh' was a Jeff Redmond.  Jeff tries to be helpful with limited success.  Greg tries to take the problem away from her in a bit of macho display that fails.  Where is the solution, or is there one?

One line summary: Slow boiling fantasy thriller.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 8/10 Dingy and dark realistic photography of a town in steep decline in Michigan, USA.  It looks professionally done and adds to the atmosphere, I suppose.

Sound: 7/10 I can hear the dialog, which is the first big test on sound.  Did the foley or background music add much to the proceedings?  During the first 50 minutes, not so much.  Later the electronic music did some mood augmentation.

Acting: 6/10 The acting was much better than I expected for this sort of film.

Screenplay: 4/10 There is no possibility that any of the events in this film could happen, so this is supernatural horror, which I label as fantasy these days.  As usual with fantasy, one has to judge the film against its internal rules, since it has it has decided to lose connection with reality.

The one rule seems to be "if you've got it, you'll know it; convincing anyone else is another matter;" another is "pass it along or it will kill you."  The film stays pretty true to those two fantasy premises.

The film moves slowly, which was not a plus for me.  There was barely enough content here for a 42 minute television episode, much less a 105 minute feature film.  The tiny theme of the safe suburbs versus the evil city never seemed to go anywhere for me.  Just to cap everything off, the ending is nebulous.  Perhaps that was meant to be an opening for a sequel.

Some of the visuals seemed to be disconnected islands, such as when Jay swam out to a boat on a lake, and the opening scene with Annie.

Final Rating: 6/10

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