Youth, sex, death — preferably in that order — the indispensable ingredients of horror movies get a spooky shake-up in David Robert Mitchell's It Follows. Ripe with a psychosexual vibe, this creepy film can be read as a metaphor about the demon of one-night-stands, or the venereal guilt of casual sex. Or you don't have to care much, because as far as a ghost flick goes, this one remixes the old formula with wit, serves up a series of shocks, and manages to give off a stylish, purring chill.
It Follows
Starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto. Directed by David Robert Mitchell. Sneak preview at 8pm this week until June 24; wide release from June 25.
What is "it" in It Follows? Like the "thing" in John Carpenter's The Thing, the ambiguity — and the film's wilfully vague explanation of it — the shape-shifting "It" is a murderous bogeyman that cannot be ridden off because you can't pinpoint exactly what has caused it. Jay (Maika Monroe) goes on a date with a boy, and they conclude the night with a back seat coupling near an eerily lit car park in suburban Detroit. Things turn mildly violent, because after sex, the guy ties Jay up in a wheelchair and spells out the logic of the curse: the sex is an act of "passing it on", and from now on, "It" will follow her. To save herself, Jay has to "pass it on" to someone else — through sex — because if "It" kills her, the hex will move on to the guy/girl down the line, like a domino of death. "It" can look like anyone, and it will always walk slowly towards her. She can buy herself some time by running way, but eventually it will catch up with her.
You wonder if "It" would be able to trace its way back to the original sin. But let's not get hung up on that. Soon the film doles out a few selections of "It", most of them scary, and it shows that Mitchell's sense of dread and timing is pretty remarkable. Jay and her gang — the shy Paul (Keir Gilchrist), who has a crush on Jay and would no doubt offer to receive the curse from her, the nerdy Yara (Olivia Luccadi), Jay's sister Kelly (Llili Sepe), and a leering boy next door Greg (Daniel Zovatto) — hit the road in the elusive hope of escaping from the thing, which is of course not possible. As they're holed up at a beach house, the ghost shows up in various guises, in broad daylight, and while the question of whether they can kill this terrorising being puts some dent in the lucidity of the story, we tend to forgive that when the scare quotient is kept high.
The John Carpenter influence is visible; we're reminded of The Thing and Halloween. Mitchell, however, has updated the sensibility and housed his damsel-in-distress narrative in a cool, lonely interiority of Jay. The tension between sexual frustration and freedom, between the anticipation and the aftermath of sex, is carried by the two sensitive actors, Monroe as Jay and Gilchrist as Paul. Clearly, the whole premise of the film has something to do with the danger of sex, but the film doesn't posit that as a cautionary tale — as many horror films starring lusty teens inadvertently become — but rather as a form of survival instinct.
The director's home turf of Detroit, with its grim rows of deserted houses and urban decay, also plays to the effect of isolation and abandonment. Most of all, 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. Nothing is scarier, or sadder, than when you have to look back over your shoulder all your life.
Love & Mercy
Starring John Cusack, Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks, Paul Giamatti. Directed by Bill Pohlad.
For a biopic of a tormented musician, Love & Mercy has an unconventional ambition under its strictly conventional frame. This is the story of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, the gifted artist who created strings of hits in the 1960s, then cooked up revolutionary sounds way ahead of his time, and later suffered a mental illness that nearly wrecked his life. There's always something banal in Hollywood treatments of tortured geniuses, in the structured sweep of success and tragedy and, in some lucky cases, redemption. Love & Mercy feels that way too, sometimes, but Bill Pohlad's film also has an emotional authenticity and genuine interest in the process of music-making. And the two actors who play Wilson — Paul Dano and John Cusack, especially the former — relay the experiential inner life of the man with something close to personal intensity.
The film shuffles between two periods in Wilson's life: the 1960s, when The Beach Boys are at the crest of their chart-topping popularity and when Wilson (Dano), spurred by The Beatles' bold music, begins experimenting with postmodern soundscape that would result in the seminal Pet Sounds album; and the late 1980s when Wilson (Cusack), diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, lives in the fascistic clutch of therapist Dr Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) and yet begins to see a ray of hope when he meets a car saleswoman Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks).
Why two actors? This is one way Love & Mercy tries to break away from the biopic blueprint; it's not just a stunt, and not just a way to avoid having one actor covering a span of 30 years of Wilson's life (presumably with funny make-up). Cusack plays the older self of the artist, but I believe he doesn't just represent the advancing years — having two actors who don't look exactly alike playing the same man hints at the two halves of Wilson's unusual, split existence. Here's the man who nearly can't recall himself of 20 years ago. The diagnosis that he had paranoid schizophrenia would prove wrong — Dr Landy exploited it to control Wilson's wealth — and yet the aural hallucinations that he suffered since the 1960s was a cursed gift that drove him towards a life-altering breakdown.
Dano, nerdy, pudgy, with a mop of hair and eyes of an ever-curious dog, plays young Wilson as an eternal boy prodigy, a rock'n'roll god and a traumatic son cowed by his pitiless father (Bill Camp, very convincing). Their scenes together are among the film's most powerful, especially the early encounter when Wilson plays his dad a section of God Only Knows and is brutally dismissed — the making of a genius is always the struggle to get out of the patriarchal shadow.
But what makes Love & Mercy striking is the way it devotes many long stretches to showing Wilson's zippy energy as he bounces around a recording studio working with musicians; these scenes are shot with hand-held camera resembling the style of rock documentary, and it captures the intimacy and camaraderie of music professionals in the milieu that drives Wilson to the peak of his creativity — before the noise in his ears (or his head) defeats it all just years later.
Cusack, meanwhile, plays a wreck, and though sometimes he has to resort to stock gestures and tics, à la Rain Man, the actor gives us his most touching part in years. We see him — Brian in the mid-1980s — in a Cadillac showroom in Los Angeles as Kenny G's Songbird is playing in the background (a bad omen). As he's assisted by a saleswoman, Melinda, we realise that Wilson is still a boy, a bright boy beaten down by the world that's too cruel for his sensitivities, and Cusack plays him with the right balance of sadness and confusion. It helps that Wilson, for all his popularity and talent, is not a star who appears ubiquitously in the media, and the actors playing him have more room to manoeuvre and "create" him as a persona and a character.
Love & Mercy is what the title suggests: a biopic that's tender and merciful. At times, it has to struggle to convey the inner life of Wilson — his drug-use days, his gradual collapse, the noise in his head, culminating in the dream scene near the end that's probably too heavy-handed. But it's a movie anchored firmly in the sympathy for the man who deserves more than a bed-bound life fed by excessive medication, the rock god who has fallen but bumped into his salvation. God truly only knows.
