it follows [2014]

a 19 year old college student living in detroit, michigan, falls for a boy.  they go on a couple of dates.  she decides to have sex with the boy, in a car, after a special night out with the young man.  she passes out and wakes tied to a wheelchair in an abandoned building.  the boy explains that he gave her something.  that something is walking toward her now.  that something can take the form of a stranger or a loved one.  but what she needs to know is that something will not stop walking to her until she is dead, or she can pass the curse to someone else via sex.

pretty heady stuff.  and already i am suspect that this flick will be an allegory on the dangers of teen sex.  but no.  rather, the writer/director, david robert mitchell, crafted an oneiric mood piece that harkens back to classic 1980s horror films, replete with a killer analog synth score.  mitchell knows how to stretch out dread.  even the most hardened horror movie buff can find much to admire in this pic.

the dream-like nature of the movie is made acute by the technology used by the characters.  the score, and the photography of the movie, again, recalls the 1980s but there are touches of tech that wrench this movie out of time.  indeed, there is a prologue of a victim of the curse running out of her house.  the victim, annie, is a young woman clad in her knickers and t-shirt.  it is dusk.  she bursts from her house and runs into the street.  she is not invisible.  a neighbor who is taking groceries from the trunk of her car asks annie if she is okay.  annie answers yes.  do you need help?  the neighbor inquires.  no, said annie.  so those that are afflicted by that 'it' that follows slowly and steadily walks toward its victims suffer in the worse way: not in the shadows, but in broad view of everyone and no one can help.

but i was speaking about technology.  annie uses 21st century smart phone and drives a 21st century car.  the other characters drive well-used 1960s - '80s vehicles.  their dress looks as if the clothes are of '80s vintage.  but the TVs they watch old horror movies on look like they are from the 1970s.  there is another detail that makes it impossible to know the year of the action of the movie.  one character is reading dostoevsky's 'the idiot' on an e-reader in the form of a pink clam shell.  so i have no fucking idea what year it is supposed to be.

i read that was the purpose of the filmmaker who wanted to make a a movie that is a waking dream, or nightmare.  indeed, it is hard to tell the season for the landscape looks like it might be fall, say around halloween, the characters sometimes where jackets, or t-shirt and shorts, or a dressed in their knickers, or hanging at the beach in their swimwear.  it is everytime, or all-time.  the effect is to heighten the feeling of unease.

haven't we all had that nightmare where we tried to get away from something or someone who is slowly, but inexorably, walking toward us?  we can't get away.  we can't evade it.  we can only suffer under it.  i know i've had that nightmare.  and so david robert mitchell made a movie that reaches into our dreams and spreads our helplessness and unease before a faceless force that marches toward us, forever and ever.