It Follows
Crit
What I expected going in was something nearly as scary as The Babadook and nearly as weirdly creepy as Under the Skin, but in fact, the mood here--clearly no accident--is Halloween. Though the setting is an eminently safe northern suburb of Detroit, the home neighborhood could be Haddonfield, and if the sweep of fallen leaves in the opening shot doesn't say October emphatically enough to you, check out the house number of the first victim of whatever "it" is: 1492. And if that's not enough, toss in a few b&w scary movies being watched on TV.
Wonderful logic: "it" is the variously embodied (usually strangers, but sometimes even more scarily not) manifestation of a curse passed along via coitus. Once you're "tagged," as it were, the force is always walking (critically, walking, slowly) to you, and if it reaches you, it will kill you if it can. You can see it, as can those previously affected, but no one else can--but the uninfected can touch and be touched by the fully corporeal being. And once you pass the curse along, you're still not off the hook, because if it kills the target, then the one who sexually transmitted the dis-ease to that target becomes the target again.
I think you can see the ethical issue. There's that, there's some beautiful exploitation and misdirection of horror film cliché and trope, a wonderful rescue-attempt illustration of the law of unintended consequences, and lots of good old-fashion eek. Damn, we are in a good time for scary flicks!
Trailers
- Heaven Knows What--A documentary-ish look at East Village drug culture; looks excruciating if not unwatchable.
- Unfriended--Embarrassing video posted, teen commits suicide, comes back to haunt her false friends online. Yawn.
- Adult Beginners--In the searching sibling tradition of You Can Count on Me and The Skeleton Twins.
- Ex Machina--A much extended trailer from the one I'd been seeing, suggesting that that one didn't get the dystopic vibe across adequately.
- Mad Max: Fury Road--Charlize Theron in a Mad Mad flick? And no Mel Gibson? Hell yes!
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