Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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24 UCW APRIL 1-7, 2015 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM Look Behind You Cinderella (Rated R) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS I loved It Follows (100 minutes). Much like Paranormal Activity and Insidious, I didn't hear much beyond vague praise before I decided to go and see it. Microbudget horror can go either horribly wrong or horribly right, and since there usually isn't much budget to advertise, festival word-of-mouth can make it or break it. I had heard it was good, but I didn't know anything else about it, and the Internet Movie Database was maddeningly unhelp- ful. Something about sex and a young girl and an unknown force — but honestly, if I had known more about the plot I'm not sure it would have been quite so successful at pushing my scared button. After 15 minutes, writer-director David Robert Mitchell had me on the edge of my seat. Unlike some quicker building, more traditional low budget horror films like You're Next, It Follows relied on a wide-angle lens and an atmosphere of dread to build anticipation. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I knew it was going to be epically scary. It is hard to know what is going on as the film opens. On a suburban street, presumably somewhere north of the Eight Mile in Detroit, a girl runs out of one house and into another. The camera whirls, passersby, um, pass by and she f lees in her car to a beach. There, she waits. In the next scene her mutilated corpse dominates the screen, and the story shifts elsewhere. A group of friends is the new center of the story, and they are in no way distinguishable from any group of post-high school adolescents adrift in malaise. The pretty one, Jay (Maika Monroe), has a date with a random guy (Jake Weary). Their date starts out fine and seems to end more or less where the audience expects it to. If the monster's story gets a little muddied along the way, it's a forgivable bit of misdirection. Then, things take a hard left. The pretty girl has received a gift from her date, the kind that can't be returned. From the moment she is dropped off outside her house hysterical, the viewer is forced to play catch up in under- standing what turns out to be a chillingly simple monster mythos. It follows. It's not fast. In fact, it walks. But it is coming and it won't stop. The heart of the story rests on the conceit of a million horror stories, although admittedly this one rather suc- cessfully updates the central question. If you could pick someone to die in your place, would you? And who would it be? Would you trick them? Would you tell them the stakes? If they didn't believe you, would you choose someone else? Jay's friends (Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Seppe, and Daniel Zovatto) pursue a strategy of cautious tolerance. After all, they can't actually see anything but Jay, acting nuttier and nuttier. They group eventually become believers, and do their best to track down Jay's date — who used a fake name and rented address. When they finally find him, he tells them that despite all his efforts he is still seeing the monster, belying the claim that when Jay passes it on to another victim she will be free (as long as her victim passes the monster along in turn). The story makes its way to an ending that falls far short of its potential. Overall, the film is haunting. The word that comes to mind is implacable surre- alism … no coincidence, I'm sure, since Mitchell claims he based the story on his recurrent childhood dreams of being followed. At the end of the day, even if the ending wasn't totally sat- isfying, it was still 10 times better than the average big budget garbagefest. HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@ upandcomingweekly.com. 910.484.6200. Log on. Plan a getaway. Let yourself unplug. a we b s ite to ta ke yo u to pl a c e s wh e re th e re a re n o we b s ite s . NC Tourism_Ad Layouts_4C_NEWS_9.88x10_FINAL.indd 3 6/4/14 4:45 PM