Like everyone else, we like to relax with some films that are pure fluff once in a while. For me however, I find that I’m unable to enjoy most action films apart from the superhero genre. It’s just really difficult to suspend disbelief for them and to take them seriously. Horror films still work on me though, which is why I pay attention to interesting new releases for that genre though it’s true that I probably like them a lot more than my wife does.

Jay is your typical all-American teenage girl who lives in a nice house in the suburbs. She meets and likes a new guy and her sister and friends seem mostly happy for her. But it soon turns out that the guy has nefarious motives and not in the usual way. After having sex for the first time, he explains to her that he only did it to pass on a sort of curse to her. From now on, wherever she goes, it follows her and if it catches her, it will kill her. It can take the form of any person and is completely single-minded in its pursuit but is limited to only moving at a steady walk and only those affected by the curse can see it. The only way to get rid of it is by having sex with another person but even then you’re not completely safe. If it manages to kill its current target, it will revert back to the previous one.

It’s an incredibly simple premise for a horror movie monster, so simple that you might hardly believe that it could work, but it does. The film ratchets the tension up so deftly that you’ll soon be scanning the background of every shot for any sign of a slowly advancing human silhouette. As my wife notes, even the sight of an open doorway is a cause for alarm. The monster moves so slowly that so long as you remain alert and active you’ll always be able to outpace it but as it is inexorable, the horror is that you’ll never be able to get a good night’s rest or relax for even a moment. The fact that only you can see it limits the ability of the people around you to help you, even if they believe in your preposterous story. That the victim is perceived by everyone else as a raving lunatic, running away from absolutely nothing is also part of the horror.

Like so many horror monsters, it does break down at its edges. I enjoyed how Jay managed to convince her friends that the monster is real and they come up with reasonable plans on how to deal with it. One arms her with a handgun and teaches her how to use it while another hatches a plan to trap and perhaps kill the monster. Unfortunately, once they start to march down this path you can’t help but to wonder about the many other things they could have done instead. This includes simple things like running further away, to another continent if possible and seeing if it can follow to standard measures of dealing with invisible enemies, like covering the floor with flour. Most of all, it bothered me while watching that the adults never get involved at all, not even after Jay gets hospitalized after crashing a car. I get that given the genre of this film, having adults solve all of their problems would kind of miss the point but it really grated on me how unrealistic this was.

Director David Robert Mitchell is fortunately well aware of these problems and works hard to insinuate that all of these events take place not in the real world, but in some kind of weird alternative reality that adheres to dream logic. Early on, I noticed how hard it is to place the film in a definitive time period. There are cars, ancient television sets and home decor that scream 1970s, yet everyone basically wears modern clothes and most importantly use mobile phones. It seems that this was a deliberate decision to keep the audience off kilter and uncomfortable without really knowing why. There are also interesting bits of story that are shown but never talked about. Jay never tells her friends the forms that the monster takes but we can guess that in the climactic scene it actually appears as her father who seems to be absent and may be deceased. Mitchell has commented that the idea for this film came to him as irrational fears from having nightmares and he wanted to convey the same dream-like quality that defies logic and common sense. It’s not a bullet-proof explanation by any means but it’s good enough for me.

So yeah, I picked this one up because of its reputation as a solid and scary indie horror film and it doesn’t disappoint. There are legitimate quibbles to be had about its world building and the inconsistency of the rules governing the monster but I loved that the director made an effort to hand-wave away these problems using dream logic. Most of all however, I commend its director for identifying a single, primal and powerful fear and exploiting it to its fullest extent, resulting in a horror film that really is scary.