IT FOLLOWS

In a quiet American suburb, a girl runs through the street as if chased by someone, asks for help, and takes the car to go to the lake where, after calling her father in tears telling him she loves him and her mother, she is found dead the next morning under mysterious circumstances. Sometime later, a beautiful girl named Jay meets Hugh, a handsome young man whom she falls hopelessly in love with to the point of spending a fiery night of sex in the car. The fairy-tale love story, however, quickly turns into a nightmare as Hugh, through the sexual act, has transmitted to her an ill-defined entity that will haunt her until Jay has sex with another man, thus managing to pass this "thing" on to another. All of this, however, has a not insignificant complication: if the person to whom it is passed dies, the entity returns to the previous owner. A vicious circle that triggers a whirlwind of fear and paranoia whose solution is much more complex and difficult than expected. It was 2010 when David Robert Mitchell, in his debut film, titled "The Myth of the American Sleepover", told with an authorial touch, but still quite immature and pretentious, about American teenagers and their first approach to love, or rather, their first sexual urges within the first parties organized with their peers. Five years later, the American director returns to similar themes, but this time with a decidedly more confident and refined style and an artistic maturity sometimes surprising given the shortcomings shown in the previous film. Much of the credit for these advances is due to the horror element that, masterfully handled by Mitchell, manages to transform a story like so many others into a terrifying work for its adherence to reality and the myriad of metaphorical contents and enriched by a variety of admirable technical solutions not easy to find within a film that wants to be cataloged as "genre". All these characteristics have made it, in recent months, alongside titles like "The Babadook" and "The Witch" to name a few examples, a viral phenomenon appreciated by many fans who had long hoped for its release in theaters. Mitchell, in fact, proves to be a true master in building constant tension that does not need sound jumps and other typical styles of the genre to hit the mark and transmit unease to the viewer. What is most frightening, in fact, is the theme treated, the "thing" that leaves the door open to an endless series of interpretations and metaphors that can be AIDS or the huge caldron of prejudices and condemnations of puritanical society towards those who consume before marriage or also the desire of young people to transgress and give free rein to their sexual fantasies. In short, a threat very close to us that the director is very skillful in not belittling through unnecessary explanations that would have ruined the atmosphere created and to materialize through presences and ghosts whose slow advance is made even more anguishing by the continuous use of long shots and spacious framing that convey the sensation that danger can come from any point and at any moment. "It Follows", however, is far from being a boring and conceptual work and the heaviness of the subject is softened by the continuous references to the 1980s – the golden decade of horror – which range from the hypnotic music of "Disasterpeace" to the settings that strongly recall those of Carpenter's first "Halloween", passing through the dynamics of slasher movies. Notable, moreover, is the sequence of the appearance beyond the glass of the aula of an elderly woman, who then follows Jay down the school corridor, which represents a clear reference to a famous scene from "In the Mouth of Madness" also by Carpenter. The performance of the young rising star Maika Monroe is simply superb and her skill overshadows her colleagues who, however, manage to perfectly embody their roles. "It Follows", in conclusion, is a complex film, makes you think but does not lose sight of its nature as entertainment cinema. Highly recommended for those who do not want to see the usual repetitive and cliché-filled horror. Success on the web more than deserved as well as the promotion to full votes.