Yuhao88

This is one of those movies that's generated so many polarized opinions that it's hard to sift through them all. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor: stop scrolling through reviews right now and go watch it. "It Follows" isn't perfect, and some people might find it genuinely ridiculous, but it's original enough to deserve being viewed with fresh eyes and an open mind.

What hooked me was the essentially nightmarish quality of the premise: an inexplicable "thing" following you, relentlessly, no matter what. You can run, as they say, but you can't hide. "It" often takes forms that are (seemingly) non-threatening yet incongruous: a hospital-gowned old woman in a school hallway, for instance. By its very premise, this movie builds an atmosphere of dread that I've never felt before. The first time a character makes note of a "person" that he quickly discovers no one else can see was almost unbearably tense.

However, the monster in "It Follows" does fall into the trap that all such heavily rule-based creatures fall into: you'll spend most of the movie thinking of creative ways to beat it. This is especially so in the second half, where all the characters are trying to plan out exactly that. It also starts getting weighed down a bit by the sexual drama, some of which is a little groan-worthy (case in point: the boy who seems completely willing to inherit a death curse if it means he can sleep with his friend). These two negatives might be enough to kill the experience for some - I thought the acting (especially from lead Maika Monroe) was good enough to pull me through when another movie might have lost me completely.

"It Follows" seems to be a love/hate it kind of movie, and one you'll really need to form your own opinions on. I won't extol it as "the best thing to happen to horror in years", but it's a nicely constructed and brave little film worth seeing - if only to find out what everyone's talking about!

To be honest, this movie baffled me. Is it absolutely terrible? No. Did it have potential? Yes. But somehow all of it amounted to only this bizarre mess of a film. Let me put something out there first: "We Are Still Here" clocks in at one hour and 17 minutes. At the end I expected there to be 20 more minutes of movie left. The whole thing felt rushed, and the ending was...abrupt, to say the least.

The story follows a couple who move into a new house hoping to move past the death of their son. This is a time-tested plot. However, "We Are Still Here" proceeds to give us almost no information about the son and no time to feel the weight of his parent's grief. It merely establishes that his mother can "feel his presence" in the house before embarking on a series of cheap scares. There are several very sudden character deaths that in a better movie would seem bold. Here they just seem lazy. There is precisely one very creepy moment that would have been perfect if it hadn't immediately transitioned to a series of jump scares (that it was also intercut with Lisa Marie's "acting" didn't help).

The later scenes involve almost cartoonish amounts of gore. If the movie was an intentional horror-comedy this would have been fine. The first 3/4 of the movie seemed to be going for straight horror, though, so I didn't know what to make of it. I could talk about the bad writing and jarringly terrible lighting as well, but what would be the point? It ultimately felt like a short film stretched beyond its limit. The concept would have worked great in a tight 15-20 minutes, where movies can get away with the spareness and ambiguity that "We Are Still Here" features. As it is, though, it feels like a movie that ran out of budget and ideas long before it was truly finished.