Institute History
Description
As 19-year-old Jay's summer—spent hanging with friends, lounging in a backyard pool—nears an end, her unperturbed suburban existence is about to be horrifyingly upended. After sleeping with a new boyfriend, she's suddenly pursued, slowly but persistently, by a malevolent supernatural presence that takes the form of different people. Hoping to buy time and devise a plan, Jay and her friends escape to a beach house. But it's coming.
Premiering in Cannes and aptly reviewed as a "teen horror movie like you've never seen it before," David Robert Mitchell's It Follows is one of the most original indie films in years and an unrelentingly creepy experience that pairs edge-of-your-seat suspense with a beautifully poetic exploration of teenage sexual anxiety, yearning, and jealousy. His unnerving, dreamlike aesthetic—its long takes, eerily deliberate zooms and harrowing electronic score by Disasterpeace—lingers precariously over innocuous suburban tableaus and plays brilliantly with off-screen space, mercilessly baiting us with the edges of the frame. Perfect fodder for horror and allegory, the film’s unseen psychosexual menace may be sluggish, but slow and steady wins the race. —J.N.