Jay, a college student is seeing a charming young man and eventually ends up having sex in his car on one of their dates. Soon after that, he breaks the news to her that the intercourse has passed on to her -something that has been haunting him ever since he acquired it from sex with another woman. He also warns that the supernatural stalker would follow her and is destined to kill her until she passes it on to another man. Plagued by the mystery figure that takes up various forms, Jay and her sister Kelly along with friends Paul, Yara and Greg try to wriggle out from the seeming unbreakable grip of ‘It’ and their misadventures form the rest of the movie.
Language:
English
Running Time:
96 min
Rating:
A
Release date:
10 April 2015
Directed by:
David Robert Mitchell
Produced by:
Rebecca Green
Laura D. Smith
David Robert Mitchell
David Kaplan
Erik Rommesmo
Written by:
David Robert Mitchell
Starring:
Maika Monroe
Keir Gilchrist
Daniel Zovatto
Jake Weary
Olivia Luccardi
Lili Sepe
Music by:
Disasterpeace
Shot by:
Mike Gioulakis
Editing by:
Julio C. Perez IV
Distributed by:
RADiUS-TWC

What’s Hot

  • Maika Monroe slips in so casually into the perennially disturbed damsel in distress with her portrayal of Jay, the college beauty who gets into a tangle with a supernatural force. Keir Gilchrist is very relatable as a timid Paul who has a crush for Jay and puts up a convincing performance. Characters of Kelly, Yara and Greg are just adequate to fill in their respective roles in the movie and complete a wholesome cast.
  • The scenes of horror and thrill are upheld by Disasterpeace’s skill with the guitar. In between the customary horror-flick formula background scores, there are noticeable instances of unique sound orchestrations interspersed to garner the attention and maintain a nice level of suspense.
  • Wide screen frames are put to best use by Mike Gioulakis in most of the outdoor scenes and his talent is visually obvious with the many 360 degree pan shots canned for the most engrossing scenes of the movie. The light engineering is of great quality as well to bring out the best Cinematography.
  • Old-school scare tactics of endless stalking and jolting scenes in a quiet setting are let out to do their part. To call out specifics – the one where a ball crashes into the window when Jay is inspecting her body and the ones where doors break up, collapse the silence into a few scary outbursts from the audience.

What’s Not

  • Though it is a fantasy horror subject that makes the characters in believing that having sex with carriers of an evil force transfers the focus of the evil on to them, the basic concept is too weak to guarantee a scary horror movie and seems more of an excuse to feature numerous sexual partners for the lead character. The manifestations of evil fail to evoke any spine chilling fear to make it more of just suspense without much of action.
  • The Execution of the script leaves much to be desired – evil will follow any one who gets involved in the chain until they are dead or create a new link in the chain, but the movie leaves too many open ended questions like what is ‘it’? Why it does these things? Though a possibility of a sequel is left open at the end, the end arrives quite abruptly without building up on these aspects.

Badges

Verdict

Verdict Stamp

Stalking can be scary and to get to know that having sex makes evokes an evil stalker destined to kill you – 'It Follows' has just the right kind of base to make one hellish horror movie, but it fails to capitalize on the good work by the technical crew and is driven around borderline normalcy by its confusing execution. What you get is 100 minutes of suspense sans much of fear and turns out to be just another ordinary thriller movie.