Review of It Follows

Yeah Idk, if this is one of the best of the past few years, the horror genre is most definitely in the toilet right now. Not that there's never any quality films being released, but the feces always seems to float to the top for some reason. Must be the average horror director's diet I guess; a combination of bad teenage actors, a poorly written script, a super weird concept, and just a sense of wasted time has never sat well in my stomach. Not that this film was garbage by any means, because it really isn't, but it just hit too many beats and missed too many marks for it to be a good movie. I'll start with the strongest characteristic of the film which was most definitely the camerawork. The way it spins around the environment at a fixed point is incredibly eerie and pretty smart too. Generally, there's at least a few extras in the setting who happen to be walking towards the camera (which is the main shtick here - Maika Monroe has been "infected" with this weird occurrence where an entity disguised as a random person follows her slowly until it finally catches up and kills her after she had sex with a man already "infected."), and I was always franticly searching for the one with blacked out eyes. The constant extended zooms and pans were very unnerving and gave an air of admonishment. This alone puts it above a bunch of horror movies in that it has a creative concept in how it's filmed, and it uses this concept professionally in order to obtain what it wants. I also want to praise the fact that this film did get my heart beating a few times without using a jumpscare (even though a few were used throughout, they really could have been removed). And lastly, while the concept was weird, it was pretty original and I think if it were executed better it would have been an intriguing movie. And that's about it for praise. So maybe the biggest downfall was that it was so boooooring. The blood-pumping scenes are so few and far between and the space in between is filled with blasé dialogue about "Hey whadda we do guys?" "Idk man! I'm scared!" "AAAAAAAAAAA." Or actually, scratch that, the biggest downfall was that this movie gave the sense that it thought it was way more important and way better than it actually was, similar to It Comes At Night from last year as well. This is just any other schlocky horror film except that it looks nice. Really! If you closed your eyes, would the dialogue and ambience be enough to carry it? I can at least appreciate a movie like Happy Death Day, also from last year, for having fun with the material even though the material is a cheap knock-off of Groundhog Day. At least it doesn't have a pretentious miasma masking it attempting to make me feel like I'm watching some horror masterpiece. If it's a masterpiece, it just will be - no need to try and convince me it is. A masterpiece certainly wouldn't have CGI that just looked this awful for some reason? A masterpiece wouldn't make the antagonist so GOOFy lookin the way it walks. A masterpiece would have a more climatic ending that didn't rehash an attempted solution that had already failed like three times already in the movie! Go watch The VVitch if you want a good modern horror film that takes itself seriously. Or rather, go watch Happy Death Day for a fun, shlock-embraced mess.