It Follows is the 2014 psychological horror film written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, starring Maika Monroe and set in and around a deliberately timeless, faintly retro version of suburban Detroit. The premise is its hook: after a sexual encounter, a young woman finds herself cursed, pursued by an entity that follows her relentlessly. It only ever walks, never runs. It can take the form of anyone — a stranger, a friend, a loved one — and only the cursed person can see it. If it catches you, you die. The only escape is to pass it on to someone else, though if they're killed, it returns down the chain to you. It's a fantastic, skin-crawling concept, and I went in genuinely intrigued.

And I want to be clear about what works here, because plenty does. The creepiness is real. Mitchell and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis build dread through long, slow pans, static lingering wide shots, and uncomfortable pauses that force you to scan the background of every frame yourself — searching for the figure, wondering if that distant person walking toward the camera is just a passerby or the thing itself. That technique got under my skin. There were genuine stretches where I felt deeply uncomfortable in exactly the way the film intends, and the much-praised synth score does a lot of quiet work in maintaining that unease.

But here's where I have to be honest with myself. It Follows is a critical darling — widely celebrated for its atmosphere, its dread, its sexual-anxiety metaphor, and its score. And I came out the other side feeling distinctly lukewarm. It was fine. And I've spent a while sitting with why.

I suspect a good portion of this is on me. I watch a lot of fast-paced, high-energy films, and It Follows is the opposite of that — slow, deliberate, and eerie by design. In certain moments that pacing is a genuine strength, allowing the tension to build and breathe. But in other stretches I found myself waiting for an impact, a payoff, a jolt that never quite arrived. The slowness that elevates the best scenes also flattened my engagement in the quieter ones.

I also genuinely struggled to identify a standout performance. Nobody in the cast is bad — Monroe anchors the film perfectly competently as the lead — but nobody grabbed me or elevated the material in a way I'll remember. Everyone was simply okay. Present. Functional. For a film leaning this heavily on mood and character, I wanted at least one performance to truly hook me, and none did.

So where does that leave me? I didn't love it. I didn't hate it. It simply sort of happened to me — which is perhaps the most lukewarm response a horror film can provoke. I can recognise the craft. I can see exactly why so many people adore it. It just didn't land for me the way it clearly lands for others.