Young Jay (Maika Monroe) has consensual sex with a stranger, Hugh (Jake
Weary), on the backseat of his car ... then he ties her up, tells her he
has infected her with a curse and that from now on she will be followed by
a slow-walking being that can take the form of any human, who will try to
kill her ... unless she passes the curse on to someone else via sexual
intercourse. However, if that person is killed, the curse falls back on
her. At first, Jay doesn't believe into that curse at all, but the
experience was traumatic enough that she asks her best friends to stay
with her for the night ... but then she has to find out that
"it" is apparently really following her and trying to get into
the house, which causes her to make a hasty escape. Jay and her friends
escape to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, but it follows, tries to make
its way into the cabin, and actually manages to injure Jay. In the
hospital, Jay has sex with her best friend Greg (Daniel Zovatto), who's
less than sure he believes into the curse, but would be lying if he'd
denie he wanted to have sex with her for a long time. Three weeks later,
it seems that the curse has been lifted, Jay hasn't been followed anymore,
and Greg says he hasn't either ... then one day he's killed by
whatever-it-is, appearing as his own mother. Jay makes an escape and has
sex with a random stranger to buy some time ... but it returns, and when
she and her friends try to destroy it in a public pool at night, that
almost backfires. It's only when Jay's best friend Paul (Keir
Gilchrist), who has suffered through all of this because he's secretly in
love with her, offers to have sex with her to help her take care of her
problem that she finds hope once again ... It Follows
has a great, original and truly haunting premise, it features some very
creepy scenes, and is carried by a great central performance by Maika
Monroe - which all makes it a pretty good horror film that falls a bit
short of being great by a handful of scenes that just haven't been thought
through, like when Jay makes her first hasty escape by car, why does she
stop eventually to sit down on a swing. Another time she makes an escape
she then gets out of the car to sleep on the car's hood in the open. Also
the scene in the public pool fails to make sense at all, as the plan seems
to absolutely moronic and without any failsaves that it doesn't really
compute. All that said, it's still pretty good, and something vastly
different from your usual teen-slasher - but it's also a film that makes
it easy to nitpick ...
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