Few films each year get the distinction of screening at the majority of the major film festivals, but following in the path of Blue Ruin, Only Lovers Left Alive and spare others, we’ll be getting another one early next year. After premiering to much acclaim at Cannes, It Follows stopped by Toronto International Film Festival and before screening at Sundance Film Festival, the first trailer has now arrived.
Coming from writer-director David Robert Mitchell, who came on our radar after The Myth of the American Sleepover, the story follows Maika Monroe (who made an impression in this fall’s The Guest) as a teenager who is cursed by a shape-shifting spirit after her first sexual encounter. While that might seem like the set-up for your standard slasher, there looks to be much more going on here.
We said in our review, “A teenage girl, captured through a static wide shot, runs through a quaint Detroit suburb, her body dwarfed by its trees and middle-class homes. The sense that something is not as it seems becomes realized quite quickly. This prologue, while one of the most formally well-executed sequences in the film, sets up a certain expectation, and luckily It Follows isn’t so much interested in that now-tired the-evil-that-lurks-under-the-surface-of-small-towns brand, but rather its invasion onto the iconography of it.”
The enticing first teaser, which thankfully doesn’t reveal much of the plot, comes from France and can be seen below.
For 19-year-old Jay, fall should be about school, boys and weekends out at the lake. But after a seemingly innocent sexual encounter, she finds herself plagued by strange visions and the inescapable sense that someone, or something, is following her. Faced with this burden, Jay and her teenage friends must find a way to escape the horrors that seem to be only a few steps behind.
It Follows will open early next year.
What do you think of the first trailer?