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David Robert Mitchell’s beautifully envisioned It Follows is no ordinary horror film. Though the filmmaker can be considered a novice in the industry, his only other feature, The Myth of the American Sleepover, gained the writer-director awards and acclaim, and he has seemingly carried its momentum into what is a broody, dreamy horror.

Maika Monroe stars as Jay Height; a teenage girl living in a deserted, yet eerily beautiful, suburban area of Detroit. She shares her home with mom – someone we don’t really get to see much of – and her younger sister Kelly (Sepe) and enjoys spending the lazy summer days lounging around in their family backyard pool.

She begins dating a mystery guy named Hugh (Weary) whom she soon decides to go the extra mile for and spend the night making sweet love in the back of his rather spacious ride.  After they have finished the deed, so to speak, Jay is knocked out cold by her new man only to wake up tied to a chair in the middle of nowhere and told that she is now infected with a curse. It turns out that Jay is now being relentlessly followed by a shape-shifting entity and the only way to get rid of it is to sleep with someone else before ‘it’ catches up to her and kills her.

One of the most striking things about It Follows is how every single frame – no matter how small or insignificant as it may seem – is able to tell its own story and how very little dialogue is used to create both atmosphere and plot development. The atmosphere is thick with slow-building anxiety and a profound sense of loneliness symbolised by the forsaken Detroit backdrop.

Mitchell achieves this party with a simple combination of long-shots and slow-zooms and he crafts the world of his film an abundance of subtexts and metaphors – what ‘IT’ represents is left up to the audience to decide. Additionally, the eeriness of Rich Vreeland’s synth-score – reminiscent of horror movies of the 70’s – is especially gratifying and the cast, led by the convincingly haunted Monroe, are grounded and extremely easy to connect to.

It Follows is a slow and unnerving horror film that builds masterfully; it treats its characters and its audiences intelligently, offering layers beyond the usual horror tropes – things you can’t say all that often about the contemporary horror genre.