Mitchell: It Follows (2015)

Among other things, social media encourages us to attune ourselves to the middle distance – the limits of our network, the latest additions to our online presence, people who may be following us but aren’t actually friends with us. In fact, so attuned have we become to digital culture’s middle distances that we’re less and less attuned to the middle distance as an actual physical space, as portable digital devices have brought the point of entry into our wider lives closer to our bodies and faces than ever before. In some ways, It Follows is a horror film made for that paradox, speaking to a world in which our personalities seem to cast a wider and wider radius, but in which we’re somehow even more claustrophobically confined at the centre of our social lives as well. Framed as a homage to John Carpenter – and to Halloween and Christine in particular – it’s unique among recent horror films in being utterly devoid of technology that predates the 90s, with most of the fixtures and features dating from the 70s. In part, that’s a gesture of affectionate and nostalgic retromania – and part and parcel of the current Carpenter craze more specifically – but it’s also tied to the Detroit backdrop, which recalls Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive in the way in which it simply seems to have stopped short of the post-industrial infrastructure that now typifies most American cities. As the film goes to some lengths to remind us, that also means that the distinction between inner core and suburbia – now largely blurred in most American sprawls – still holds true here as well, if only because this particular core was never gentrified or revitalised, instead fulfilling all the most paranoid fantasies that led white suburbanites to flee from the city centre in the first place. In that sense, David Robert Mitchell isn’t exactly recreating so much as revisiting one of the few remaining examples of the classic American suburbia that Carpenter identified as the province of the middle distance, the harbinger of the decentred, promiscuous and ominous sensibility that's even more inextricable from the odd, free-floating anonymity of Mitchell's mise-en-scenes. Watching them is a bit like witnessing suburbia fulfil itself, or suburbia transform from a place to a self-sufficient mindset, as Mitchell crafts vast, cavernous, yawning vistas – often reminiscent of the hyperreal photography of Gregory Crewdson – in which human life simply seems to have settled elsewhere, apart from the handful of the teenagers needed for the film’s narrative. Against that backdrop, their story is as simple as it is brilliant - their ringleader (Maika Monroe) discovers that losing her virginity has made her susceptible to a free-floating, shape-shifting, supernatural entity, until she takes someone else’s virginity. What makes this entity so unsettling is that it doesn’t tend to appear suddenly, like a regular slasher, but instead moves slowly but steadily, at a walking pace, emerging or making its presence felt whenever anyone lets their eyes rest for too long on the middle distance. For that reason, the film itself feels perpetually poised at the middle distance as well, composed almost entirely of mid and long shots, while most of the action revolves around driving, which turns out to be the best way to elude the entity short-term, as well as good practice for the kind of panoramic perception needed to elude it long-term as well. Like any competent driver, the teenagers have to learn to move between what’s right up against their face at any one moment and a looming, dawning awareness that the horizon has come that little bit closer, until the whole film feels a bit like it’s shot in a moving car, or that the real legacy of this entity is to force us to endlessly drive around suburbia with nowhere to go or get off. In a wonderful twist, one of the teenagers has a perceptual hinge to mark her progress, a scallop-shaped device that initially absorbs her in the hand-held, close-up manner of a concealed SmartPhone, only to feel more and more like a pocket mirror, a way of examining the horizon yawning back over her shoulder – and it’s a perceptual hinge that feels so uncanny, so familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, that you have to wonder whether our lives have become more suburban precisely as suburbia has been absorbed into the digital landscape that it personifies, the landscape so beautifully and eerily evoked here.