Avis des critiques

It Follows is a little bit Repulsion, a lot Halloween, and some weird J-horror thrown in, and the synthesis of all of the above is remarkably cohesive, reviving the vibe of 80s VHS slumber parties while still being unmistakably of its own millennial moment... The camera movements and haunted small town may evoke De Palma and Carpenter, but the most shocking thing about it is its sensitivity.

Mitchell exploits his brilliantly simple premise—a supernatural spin on that irrational feeling that someone is right behind you, getting closer with every step—through the kind of formal ingenuity that never goes out of style, using offscreen and background space to score big scares. It Follows may be brand new, but it works in the primal manner of something much older, like a revered Halloween staple or an urban legend passed down through the ages.

A tense and incredibly scary horror movie that also works as an exploration of the film image itself. The idea of a demon that finds and walks towards you in a straight line — often, as shot by director David Robert Mitchell, from the very depths of the frame — is unnerving, yes, but it also sets the mind on fire: You start to watch everything and everybody with suspicion.

It Follows is an unusually ambitious, beautiful, and thoughtful contemporary American horror film, made with a level of care and craftsmanship that's verboten in franchise cash-ins like the Paranormal Activity sequels or those Platinum Dunes remakes. But the film also grows boring and redundant, with no spontaneity and few thrills that feel truly in-the-moment dangerous.

That said, there's something irreplaceably American about the woozy picket-fence terror underpinning It Follows (Icon, 15), David Robert Mitchell's sinuous John Carpenter evocation. It's not the first horror film to make adolescent sexuality its chief conduit of fear, as a mysterious chasing curse is passed like an STD from one randy teen to the next, but it's bracing in its sensitivity.

it's refreshing to see a horror film that doesn't rely solely on pounding sound cues that slap and jolt us, but on the sinuous camera pans and tilts, and clever framing that nudges us to look for spectres skulking somewhere in the background. Sure, the climax at the Gothic indoor pool is a tad clumsy, but in all, It Follows alternates between patient observation and direct shocks with ease, and strange as it may sound, this is a ghost film whose strength is in the overwhelming air of melancholy.

Mitchell tends to [call the creature] "the It" in interviews. Given his second feature's wealth of John Carpenter references, however—a heritage it shares with Adam Wingard's The Guest (2014) and Jim Mickle's Cold in July (2014), two other recent American genre efforts that infuse vintage straight-to-video violence with a generous dose of psychosexual dread and other elements rare among fanboy fare—Mitchell might more aptly have dubbed his menace "the Shape.

Carpenter's reevaluation as a serious artist is long overdue in this country, so It Follows should be applauded for contributing to the paradigm shift. Yet Carpenter rarely wore his artistry on his sleeve as Mitchell does here. Follows is an effective pastiche but a studied one; by the end, even its ambiguities feel overdetermined.

Mitchell merges the grim adolescent rites of horror movies with the grisly risks of having a libido at any age. (The men and women chasing her range in age and size and beauty.) The horror of the scenario is as much emotional as it is visceral — maybe more so, given the amount of time the film shows the kids just sitting around, bored.

It Follows isn't short on grace and idiosyncratic style. Michael Gioulakis's cinematography, more art-house than genre with its eerie pools of light at night, brings an arrestingly static, tableau-like quality that echoes the highly staged scenarios of Gregory Crewdson's photos, each of them conceived as a horror movie in miniature. Alongside knowing visual echoes of Halloween, there's a deep vein of John Carpenter in the simple but unnervingly effective electronic score by Disasterpeace.

Mitchell ratchets up the mild contempt-with-affection quotient with graceful tracking shots... as well as more static symmetrical shots on the streets and sidewalks in front of charmless, utilitarian residences. He films mostly in long shot, filling the widescreen frame with signifiers of a lifestyle from which these young people should run as they would from phantoms.

In a sense all these nameless, anonymous "followers" are something of a red herring, throwing us off the scent of the real threat: the lure of sex. It Follows is not a zombie film, slasher movie, or ghost story, though it contains traces and echoes of all three; rather it's an acute take on the desperate, single-minded sexual drive of teenagehood.