Review of It Follows (2015) by Arthur G — 22 Jul 2017
Sex and death. The barest bones on which to hang a story. David Robert Mitchell's It Follows is a shivering modern fairy-tale. Luminous teens play out generational tyranny in rotting suburban twilight.
Detached, once prosperous modern homes. Cheap cars in wide drives. When a woman drinks straight from a bathroom tap the camera's gleeful focus is a web of lime stains on the chrome fittings. Each shot is paste jewellery; thin comfort and neglect.
Where are the adults? Are there any adults? What are adults anyway? A bleary, jaded Dorothy pads her yellow brick road, trapped in post-modern mania. Children blink into the arena of their lives to be handed a baton of guilt and a shrinking horizon of existential freedom.
Translucent humour flickers; a young man jibes how easily the protagonist will pass on the film's sexually transmitted curse; "She is a girl..." A love struck boy finds the vital key to his idol's predicament wedged in crusted pages of tissue strewn retro porn.
Like Nicholas Winding Renf's Drive, Mitchell's film worships the cusp between 70s and 80s; a fetish of thigh length socks and cathode ray tubes. Just a single clam-shaped e-reader reaches out to the present. That is more than enough; aesthetic separation is the only crumb offered by a story teller who otherwise stalks his viewer without mercy!
This review of It Follows (2015) was written by Arthur G on 22 Jul 2017.
It Follows has generally received positive reviews.
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