It Fol­lows

In a sin­gle, sin­u­ous take, the cam­era cir­cles a mid­dle-class sub­ur­ban street as pan­icky-look­ing-teenag­er Annie (Bai­ley Spry) runs out of her house, con­stant­ly look­ing over her shoul­der and uncon­vinc­ing­ly brush­ing aside a con­fused neighbour’s con­cern. Annie dri­ves off, and we next see her sit­ting on a beach alone at night, on the phone telling her dad that she loves him and apol­o­gis­ing for past mis­de­meanours. In this hasty good­bye to child­hood, Annie occu­pies a lit­er­al­ly lit­toral space, yet does not seem quite ready to face the infi­nite ocean at her back. Come the dawn, Annie is just a man­gled, corpse, lying bloody on the sand.

This open­ing to writer/​director David Robert Mitchell’s It Fol­lows estab­lish­es its gener­ic alle­giance to hor­ror, while also intro­duc­ing water as the film’s most flu­id of recur­ring sym­bols. When we first meet 19-year-old pro­tag­o­nist Jay (Mai­ka Mon­roe), she is float­ing, bikinied, in the bound­ed waters of a small back­yard pool. On the cusp of adult­hood, she is still con­tained with­in the pro­tec­tive envi­ron­ment of a sub­ur­ban fam­i­ly home, yet old enough to be the sex­u­alised object of the male gaze (in this case shared with two spy­ing local boys).

After hav­ing sex with her old­er boyfriend (Jake Weary), Jay dis­cov­ers that he has delib­er­ate­ly passed on to her an infec­tious afflic­tion. Some­thing relent­less, pro­tean and dead­ly is now fol­low­ing her and will even­tu­al­ly catch up – although she can slow its progress by trans­mit­ting the infec­tion sex­u­al­ly to oth­ers. Jay seeks to evade, maybe even defeat, the ​‘it’ of the title, trav­el­ling from the rel­a­tive secu­ri­ty of the leafy sub­urbs to the for­bid­den urban decay across town, and from her pad­dling pool to the big­ger pub­lic pool (where she had her first teen kiss and drink) to the beach and the alto­geth­er more dan­ger­ous waters beyond.

With all these bound­aries being trans­gressed, It Fol­lows offers anx­ious com­ing-of-age dra­ma, as Jay, her younger sis­ter, Kel­ly (Lili Sepe), and their best friends depart from the Eden of child­hood for a first dip into their own decline and mor­tal­i­ty. Set in a Detroit that could be from today or from 30 years ago, with Disasterpeace’s John Car­pen­ter-esque synth score fur­ther mud­dy­ing the chrono­log­i­cal waters, the film exhibits the same dreamy pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with teenage rites of pas­sage as its writer/​director’s lyri­cal 2010 debut The Myth of the Amer­i­can Sleep­over.

Viewed pure­ly as a mon­ster movie, this is creep­i­ly tense and often sur­re­al, with one of the most ick­i­ly Freudi­an scenes of body hor­ror in mem­o­ry. Yet, unusu­al­ly for the genre, these young teens are all like­able and gen­uine­ly look out for each oth­er, keep­ing view­ers close­ly engaged with their fates. The mon­strous antag­o­nist here is all new – and yet so ancient as to be time­less – and the film pos­i­tive­ly shim­mers with­in its own metaphor­i­cal glow.

For not unlike the Russ­ian nov­el that one of Jay’s teenaged friends reads through­out, It Fol­lows unremit­ting­ly pur­sues the two great­est themes in both art and life, as its ado­les­cent kids learn to stave off with sex, how­ev­er tem­porar­i­ly, the ineluctable approach of death. Most of all though, this is a film about wait­ing: for adult­hood, expe­ri­ence and annihilation.