How 'It Follows' Avoids Crappy B-Movie Shlock

11 April 2015 | 12:12 pm | Anthony Carew

Clichés can be good if you do them well...

It Follows

When your old bro Film Carew first saw It Follows at the 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival, a patron lost their shit, mid-way, and let loose a full-blooded scream. This seems like a pretty standard reaction to a horror-movie, but when was the last time you experienced the same? In a genre currently overloaded with barrel-scraping sequels, witless reboots, and, worst-of-all, winkingly-crappy B-movie shlock, it’s rare that a genre so genrefied can actually fulfil its functional task.

Will It Follows actually scare you? Well, that depends on your own level of in-cinema anxiety. But, what’s so beautiful about David Robert Mitchell’s second feature is that this barely matters. The film’s cult-ish word-of-mouth may stem from terrified teens, but its spotless critical acclaim comes because this is a profound, masterful, beautiful piece of filmmaking: perfectly stylised, precisely photographed, brilliantly scored, and thematically deep.

Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter

It’s, essentially, a riff on that classic horror-movie trope, where anyone who dares have sex in the opening reel — especially a girl — is marked with a Scarlet Letter, due to die first at the hands of the film’s avenging reaper. Here, idle teen Maika Monroe fucks Pacey-esque bro Jake Weary in his car, and instantly descends into a living nightmare, bequeathed a spectral STD in which she’ll be silently stalked by a malevolent spirit manifest as a dawdling zombie, the only way she can lift the curse by ‘passing it on’ to her next sexual partner.

Monroe comes out of the encounter like a rape survivor: scarred, questioned by police, gawked at in the hallway, filled with shame, suddenly repulsed by her own body. But, eventually, ‘It’ comes calling, and she and her crew — sister Lili Sepe, neighbours Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi, and Daniel Zovatto — gang together, making an Elm St.-esque pledge to stay up all night, to have each others’ backs. Both dudes volunteer to chivalrously ‘take’ Monroe’s curse from her; Mitchell wryly depicting teenage boys as happy to dabble on the darkside if it’ll help them get some. Along with the well-placed humour, the film has an entirely suggestive relationship to horror: Mitchell most interested in those moments where the kids are sitting around waiting for something to happen, when paranoia and doubt intermingle with fear, anxiety, and expectation.

Most modern horror films treat their curses as a back-story to be revealed at climax; effectively making the drama akin to therapy, where past trauma is finally put to rest via grand genre-movie catharsis. But Mitchell, gladly, never explains nor rationalises the premise at all; instead scattering artful allusions — a teacher intones T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock; Luccardi reads passages from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot — through his film. It Follows is allowed to be a true parable; its symbolism left open-to-interpretation by the sustained ambiguity, which holds all the way to its final shot. In the simplest reading, It is, simply, death; slowly stalking us all, something from which you can run, but never hide.

But there’s a fascinating socio-economic subtext at play, too. Especially when our privileged kids weigh up ‘passing it on’ down the social totem-pole; giving their deadly ‘disease’ to drunken yokels or white-trash streetwalkers a morally-excusable thing for an attractive-teen to do. It Follows was shot in Detroit, and its kids float through disintegrating houses like ghosts, haunting the abandoned streets of white-flight suburbia. In a key scene near climax, Luccardi recounts that, in her childhood, her parents wouldn’t let her go ‘south of 8 mile’, into the city proper; this, once, the border between safety and danger. In turn, the spectral terror symbolises the inexorable creep of urban decay in the Motor City, slowly spreading outward into the leafy streets.

Mitchell shoots these leafy streets with an air of lingering melancholy, recalling Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, another tale of sad-eyed teens facing death in a decaying Michigan suburb. Mitchell’s fantastic debut, The Myth Of The American Sleepover, was set in this same melancholy, semi-mythical suburbia, and It Follows feels like a definite follow-up. Both use many of the same elements — a deliberately-anachronistic sense of not-quite-contemporary timelessness; actual teenagers employed to play teenagers; a balance between naturalism and auteurist style — to make another riff on genre; to imbue a form so often used for clichés with genuine artistry.

Black Sea

“They fire men like flushing shit down the toilet. Well, this time the shit is fighting back!” pronounces Jude Law, turning to unfortunate turd metaphor when attempting to inspire the rag-tag troop of downsized naval workers he’s assembled to pull off One Last Big Job. Black Sea is, in its opening stretches, like the Full Monty of getting-the-gang-together heist movies, in which the only response to corporate consolidation of wealth and the erasure of England’s blue-collar workforce is to attempt to steal a sunken Nazi submarine full of Gold from under the noses of the Russian fleet.

Of course, when this cast of crackpot characters — Law trying on a Scots brogue and letting his male-pattern-baldness loose; Scott McNairy as uptight American suit; Michael Smiley terrifying as ever; Ben Mendelsohn a “fucking psychopath”; they all battling with the Russian half of the crew — are in a tin can 5 miles under the Black Sea, then shit hits the fan, things start going wrong, and even the most noble of men is blinded by cut-of-the-treasure greed. And what starts out as working-class-revenge thriller just becomes another generic thriller where the cast is killed off one-by-one, beginning with the least famous.

It’s another generic thriller that, weirdly, comes from the pen of Utopia creator Dennis Kelly, and is directed by sometime-documentarian Kevin Macdonald, whose career grows wonkier by the picture (see: 2013’s fucking-your-cousin-in-a-post-apocalyptic-England YA-soap How I Live Now). And it’s another generic thriller that, notably, features not a single female character; although Law at least has a hazy memory of a blonde, bikini-clad, non-speaking-part ex-wife on the beach to tide him over when coming out of a concussion. Given Black Sea is a study in downsizing as affront to one’s manhood, the hyper-macho vibes at least contribute to the text, but bros-only thrillers like this verily litter cinema’s forgotten seafloor.

Mommy

Québécois boy-wonder Xavier Dolan is still all of 26, but he’s already deep enough into his career — five films and counting — that one thing’s become abundantly clear. When Dolan is working within a restrained context — as with 2010’s Heartbeats, a droll depiction of obsessive, competitive crushes, or 2013’s Tom At The Farm, a Hitchcockian psychological-thriller — he’s fine. But, when turned loose with ‘ambition’ and operating at an operatic tenor, his films — like 2012’s epic trans-soap Laurence Anyways, and, now, Mommy — are so hysterical as to border on insufferable.

As with his teenaged debut, 2009’s I Killed My Mother, Mommy is a film ripe with maternal resentment and Oedipal issues. It gives us Anne Dorval as a drunken, foul-mouthed single mother struggling to cope with the return home, from a mental hospital, of her rambunctious, ridiculous, violent son. Forever screeching at each other, they’re more like white-trash lovers than parent and child, and eventually their relationship sucks in Suzanne Clément’s cloistered, stuttering neighbour.

The film is shot in square-format 1:1 ratio, which both evokes social-media videos and serves to imprison these characters; to constrain them within a cooped-up frame. As ever, Dolan shines when he functions as video-clip director; as in the moments of escapism or fantasy where he cranks up the music (a semi-ironically awful selection: Counting Crows, Oasis, Andrea Bocelli, etc) and pushes the frame out to wide-screen. But when not working in montage, Dolan is a filmmaker afraid of silence, and addicted to melodrama. Barely a scene goes by without characters hollering atop their lungs, Mommy unleashing an endless series of over-the-top, on-the-nose dramatic calamities.

X+Y

X+Y sounds horrifying in theory: an autistic teen goes through heartwarming coming-of-age travails en route to becoming a budding maths genius. But, though it’s not without its contrivance or corniness, Morgan Matthews’ minor, Sunday-afternoon drama succeeds by dint of its top-notch cast. Asa Butterfield shakes off the Ender’s Game blues in the lead role, showing a remarkable sense of restraint for a teenager tasked with depicting a developmental condition; Rafe Spall huffs and puffs as an MS-suffering former-teen-maths-prodigy turned unlikely Inspirational Teacher; and the Cumberbatch-as-kid kid from The Imitation Game (Alex Lawther) even proves a vivid annoying-adolescent-wonk. But it’s Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsen — both, notably, Mike Leigh vets — who shine brightest, making their sketchy characters come alive in a way that likely wasn’t written into the screenplay. The screenplay ain’t much chop —there’s a Mathematical Olympiad, an adolescent love-triangle, and carefully-meted-out dead-dad flashbacks — but, with acting this good, its limitations aren’t terminal.

the Salt Of The Earth

The Salt Of The Earth is a documentary effectively constrained from its conception. A portrait of photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, it begins from the assumed position that its subject is, unquestionably, a great man; which isn’t surprising, given it was directed by Salgado’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, produced by his wife, Léila Wanick Salgado, and spearheaded by his friend, Wim Wenders. There’s evidence to support such belief, from Salgado’s striking, increasingly-politicised black-and-white images of displaced refugees, toiling third-world workers, and wild environmental outposts, to his remarkable attempt to regrow a rainforest on his family’s once-barren Brazilian farmland.

Yet, where Salgado’s images and actions are meant to inspire awe when put on screen, watching The Salt Of The Earth inspires frustration. With its subject dictating the themes, and the makers meekly going along, one yearns for a contradictory note; for, say, the morality of a White western male coldly photographing dying Africans to be at least questioned. It’s easy to take that frustration and turn to fantasy, to wonder what Werner Herzog or Errol Morris would ask Salgado if given the opportunity. Each is renowned for his inquisitiveness, his curiosity, his wry sense of the absurd; qualities entirely absent in The Salt Of The Earth, a film so deadly earnest it turns the profound prosaic.