It Follows (2015) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw For me, David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover occupies a space in recent nostalgia films alongside stuff like Adventureland or the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko. It properly identifies a certain period in adolescence as grand drama and surreal dreamscape–when everything takes on magnified import both romantic and Romanticist–and paints that world in rich, velvet strokes. Mitchell’s follow-up, It Follows, exists in the same time and place, pools in the same crepuscular half-light of fading youth. It’s a horror movie, it’s true, and it has a bogey, sure, but what works about the film is that it’s actually about a fear of experience as it progresses, inexorable and unstoppable. Its bad guy is time, should you survive–which is really, truly fucking terrifying.

Jay (Maika Monroe) is the pretty one. She wears yellow a lot, like a daisy, and like a daisy her innocence is brief. She loses it one night, to love, to handsome Hugh (Jake Weary), and wakes up tied to a wheelchair as Hugh tells her that he’s “given” her something, something that walks, slowly, towards her through crowds, and walls. He tells her to never be in a room without another door and absolutely don’t let it touch you. He doesn’t explain how he knows this, just that he does. Jay, wracked with guilt over her poor choices, alone essentially at this juncture in her life, doesn’t know what to believe. Her friends support her, her family (though we hardly see any “adults” in the film, per se) supports her, and she does all the right things after being assaulted by calling the police and going to the hospital to get checked out. We like Jay. More importantly, we recognize her for the selves we left behind.

It would be easy to identify It Follows as a film about budding sexuality like, say, Halloween, to which, in feel and score, it owes a tremendous debt. It would be easy to discuss paranoia and how the picture pays its debts to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (more the original than the others) and Stephen King’s It (name-checked in the title in a way that’s no accident). In the end, though, It Follows is more to me like William Blake’s poetry, passionate in its base simplicity. Nevertheless, these are examinations, all, of how innocence blackens into experience, and how the horror of that happens to all of us in turn. You can’t run away from it, although you can distance yourself for a spell. Poignant to me is that the places Jay runs for time to plan, to think, are beaches, mountains–traditional spots for a vacation where we go to breed a quiet space between ourselves and the pressures of life.

Mitchell places everything in a fundamental context. When the bad things happen, the “it” unfailingly resembles a parent. There’s one moment involving a heroic buddy (Daniel Zovatto) that would be at home in a Cronenberg movie in terms of its perversion and implication. The title It Follows plays another neat trick: it’s an invitation to a conversation about causality (“Should this happen, then it follows that…”). Indeed, the film works like it does because it inspires that very conversation: It’s not about why things happen so much as it’s about why those things can be frightening. It explains stuff like “the shape” from Halloween, making it the best kind of homage; it hears the music. The opening, a long tracking, spinning pan around a girl running in circles from nothing in high-heel shoes, says everything about the Italian giallo structure, even. It Follows suffers so much fruitful unpacking with elegance and a furious, infernal grace, and its ending is something so ambiguous and strange that I’ve been worrying it for the days since. I suspect I’ll be worrying it for a while longer. Originally published: September 24, 2014.

THE BLU-RAY DISC
by Bill Chambers It Follows was shot mostly with the ARRI Alexa, and while the form of the film is very cinematic, the 2.40:1, 1080p transfer on Anchor Bay’s Blu-ray release has a perfection–razor-sharp detail–as well as imperfections–some shimmer on complex patterns like shutters, or the foliage hanging from trees–that come across as high-definition video. Dynamic range, however, has none of that digital peaking, and the hypersaturated, almost synthetic colour works in the movie’s favour, lending it a whiff of the giallo. The attendant 5.1 DTS-HD MA track is phenomenal, showcasing an expressionistic sound design whose 360° directionality and discordant spikes in volume immerse us in the heroine’s paranoia. Draped over the mix like a blanket, Disasterpiece’s score boasts a hypnotic transparency. A critics’ commentary moderated by prolific tweeter Scott Weinberg finds Weinberg flying solo for the first fifteen minutes of the feature before hosting a series of mini-podcasts with colleagues Eric D. Snider, Britt Hayes (maybe my favourite segment for touching on the Elliot Rodger in training that is Keir Gilchrist’s character), Samuel D. Zimmerman, Alison Nastasi, and Eric Vespe. Weinberg gets off on the wrong foot by misidentifying the opening scene as being a Steadicam shot (in actuality, it was done with a very long dolly track), but what he lacks in due diligence–he subsequently fishes for the correct pronunciation of some cast and crew members’ names–he more than makes up for in his palpable enthusiasm for It Follows. Gently speculating on the picture’s various subtexts, the yakker should appeal to young cinephiles, in particular, as they start thinking about film and genre in a less superficial way.

Also on board is the short but dense “A Conversation with Film Composer Disasterpiece” (5 mins., HD), in which the titular musician, a.k.a. Rich Vreeland, explains his background (he scored the videogame Fez, bringing him to the attention of It Follows writer-director David Robert Mitchell), cites the three big influences on the It Follows score (Pendericki, John Cage, John Carpenter of course), and talks a bit about the nuts and bolts of the music itself. A gallery of four specialty posters joins the It Follows (HD) trailer in rounding out the disc, which opens with startup trailers for Heaven Knows What and Snowpiercer.

100 minutes; R; 2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); English 5.1 DTS-HD MA; English SDH, Spanish subtitles; Region A; BD-50; Anchor Bay