David Robert Mitchell reminds me of Ari Aster. You look at their other work and you see original voices who found a way in with Horror/Thrillers, but both appear to want to get away from the genre quickly. Mitchell’s Horror had the more ingenious premise, and it’s easy to look at his other films and see that he’s drawn to characters who live in ennui and isolation while terrible things happen around them. For all its faults, Under the Silver Lake refuses to leave my brain and I smile when I hear from someone else who enjoyed its mysteries within mysteries.
It Follows has a hook that’s relentless like a shark, and the resulting film oozes with dread and atmosphere. The film is effectively unsettling thanks to the many different forms of The Follower (often with casual, uncomfortable nudity which I now know is another staple of the filmmaker.) While the premise is supernatural, the story and characters are presented in a very real, un-heightened way. The camerawork is often dynamic, but the lighting is flat and banal. This grounds the premise into something the viewer can find frightening in its believability. Instead of the usual jump scare noise Mitchell uses a menacing electric hum, something favored by David Lynch.
Leave A Comment