It Follows: the creepiest film seen in a long time (review)

David Robert Mitchell cites Carpenter, Lynch and Tourneur with this clever horror film telling the story of teenage America in the 2010s.

It Follows, the perfect title for a second feature, so logical that it seems crazy that no one thought of it before. Everything you loved about The Myth of the American Sleepover, the breathtaking chronicle of the pajama party seen as the founding legend of teenage America, is here again. Like the first day, like the very first time.

Upon discovering it in Cannes in May 2015, the editorial staff of First had a crush. Then its director, David Mitchellhad us again conquered thanks to Under the Silver Lakean equally paranoid film, even if its atmosphere was quite different from this horror project.

Notice to thrill-seekers: Arte program this Monday evening It Follows in the second part of the evening. Tune in at 10:40 p.m. to be startled by this creepy and well-crafted thriller. Waiting its sequel ? The director is currently preparing a dino movie with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, but he actually teased a It Follows 2…

David Robert Mitchell: “Horror allows you to be experimental and try things that are a little twisted”

The story ofIt Follows : For 19-year-old Jay, back to school was supposed to be synonymous with college classes, meeting boys and weekends spent at the lake. But after a seemingly innocuous sexual encounter, she finds herself haunted by strange visions and the inexorable feeling of being followed by a presence. Stunned, Jay and her friends must now find a way to escape this terrifying threat that seems to be catching up with them…

The Criticism of First :

The crazy empathy for a handful of kids from the Detroit suburbs, the fantasy of an adolescent self-sufficiency from which adult figures would be totally excluded, the farewells to childhood experienced like an endless summer, and this fear that pierces the gut when we contemplate the imminence of her deflowering… Everything is there, but now served by a horrific metaphor both limpid and stringy, puritanical and libertarian, where sex is experienced, alternately and sometimes at the same time, as a curse and a deliverance . A metaphor itself embedded in a network of Carpenterian quotations (suburbs at dusk), Lynchian fetishism (the red velvet of neighborhood cinemas) and Tourneurian flashes (a swimming pool at the end).

The love we have for It Follows cannot, however, be measured frankly by what the film does with its borrowings from Halloween, Blue Velvet Or The Felinerather to the way in which he methodically seizes all the themes and motifs of Sleepover to push them into the red, and then observe where it passes, and where it breaks. Two films, already a work which has come into its own and now only requires us to look elsewhere. David Mitchell is an author to, um… follow, obviously.

Trailer :

David Robert Mitchell: “Under the Silver Lake is meant to be seen multiple times”