#and the really deliberate and unsubtle cinematography

[talistheintrovert]

there's something so inherently queer in the way The Eighth Sense is being acted and ESPECIALLY in the way it's being filmed, and the cinematography and editing choices that keep taking my goddamn breath away.

the almost pain in the longing of short, broken glances to avoid being caught staring, the eyes darting over his whole face instead of lingering too long on his eyes or lips, the tentative broaching of conversation and testing of boundaries that only happens with that level of anxiety in a queer relationship

the constant fear of "what if he's not?" "what if i'm mistaken?" "what if i step too far?" which straight people rarely have to worry about, because at worst if you ask another straight person out you'll get meanly turned down, but if you're queer and you ask a straight person out the reaction could be SO bad, so you're scared and you're withholding but you're just WANTING

there are whole scenes where their friendship is clearly blooming and they both forget their sexualities and they're just having fun like they do with other people

and then there's always a moment where it THUDS back home again. the wetsuits. the showers. outside the bar. on the beach. where they're both so clearly HYPERAWARE of themselves and each other and feeling so exposed and so so scared but still desperate to be near each other

jaewon and jihyun are in parallel states of just YEARNING so badly that it makes my heart ache and my breath catch every time one of those scenes appears

[niartnithoughts]

It Follows review

Watched It Follows, a 2014 horror movie that I’ve heard a bunch of people mention. Some thoughts / a review, spoiler-free.

It Follows is a horror movie set in an intentionally ambiguous time period with an electronic soundtrack that is reminiscent of ‘80s horror movies (think a modernized Nightmare on Elm Street) without being cheesy. The movie is not campy or funny, taking itself seriously and going for some fancy cinematography and lots of intentional understating of things.

It’s perfectly fine, but I don’t think it’s particularly great, and wouldn’t really recommend it. The premise is potentially much scarier than the movie’s scenes ultimately show us, but apparently the creators were confident/intended that their audience would think on their own about extended possibilities/ramifications on their own after the movie was over. I guess that made people think it was a good movie but I don’t know if it really works for me. It’s possible I am stupider than their ideal intended audience as there were things I didn’t pick up on. But as far as the general moviegoing public is concerned I don’t think I’m on the stupid or unobservant side of things, so maybe this is just a niche film. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if some small segment of the population actually gets a ton out of it.

Like, they explicitly point out Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot in it. I absolutely believe that it’s the kind of movie that could have been throwing in constant references and symbolism with The Idiot, or for all I know it’s one of those things where each of the characters corresponds with a character from The Idiot and like all their names start with the same letters as Dostoyevsky’s characters. That wouldn’t surprise me, but I have never read The Idiot, so I wouldn’t know and can’t tell you. For all I know the way It Follows used it was brilliant, its name drop was so unsubtle that I feel like there has to be something there. (Or maybe they were just like “let’s make the audience think this high schooler is smart by having her read Dostoyevsky” and that’s it, but I give them more credit than that.)

There’s a lot of water in this movie, a lot of swimming, a lot of bodies of water. This has no greater significance to me whatsoever despite being clearly deliberate. Maybe the creators are afraid of water or maybe they just like filming at the beach. Who knows.

There was also a subplot regarding the main character’s father that was so understated I completely missed it. It’s like written into the wikipedia summary of the movie like it’s fact, not some subjective fan theory but I completely missed it. This movie has a lot of not-distinctive-looking white people in it. All the characters are white.

It takes place in a slightly surreal spacious generic American suburb (in reality just outside of Detroit), in, like I said, a made-up ambiguous time period. Lots of retro cars mixed with more current ones, no cell phones (no tinder), only old black and white movies and old fashioned theaters and TVs, fairly non time-period specific clothing, but they make sure to explicitly show you a made-up touch-screen e-reader so you don’t think it’s actually meant to be the 70s or whatever. It’s some parallel universe.

They go even further to deliberately make the time of the movie not make sense by not setting it in any particular season. It often looks like Fall, with dead leaves and pumpkins out, but then in the next scene they’ll have characters swimming outside in bathing suits or standing around in tiny shorts like it’s hot out, and in the next people will have coats on. After the movie I realized this was deliberate, some web article by a person who obviously liked the movie a lot described it as a brilliant way of subtly unsettling the audience, but I just thought it was weird rather than unsettling. Like the main character would be running around at night in very little clothes after a scene where people were more heavily dressed and I’d be thinking:

“Shouldn’t she stop for a sec to throw on some pants? She must be freezing... Well I guess there was all that swimming, so maybe not... In most horror movies I’d accuse them of just showing extra skin to be sexy, but in this one nudity is completely confined to non-sexual scenes, while the actual sex scenes are understated and have clothes on, so I don’t think they’re doing that. I guess I’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in such a warm climate, I guess when other people were wearing jackets they were just for fashion and not warmth. Fair enough.”

^That was my actual thought process during the movie. Not an especially spooky one.

Then there’s some understated (possibly verging on pretentious?) cinematography stuff like a few times when they want to cut to a new scene that takes place in the main character’s bedroom, they start with an overhead close up view of an untouched sandwich on a plate. Apparently this was a clever, understated way to have an establishing shot and to show that the main character’s usually unseen mother was making her food to try and make her feel better, but the food was left untouched, without ever having that in dialogue. But I was just like “oh, it’s the sandwich shot again” and figured she made it herself, but then couldn’t bring herself to eat. It was an effective establishing shot though, I did know it meant her bedroom. Parents are usually mysteriously absent from the movie, except sometimes they’re not, and then when one is just... there, it’s like, well why are all the other ones not in the movie then.

There are a few other times when something that had been previously understated and left up to your imagination is shown a little more explicitly, and when that happens of course it could never live up to whatever personalized horror each individual viewer might be afraid of. Specifically talking about the way ‘It’ kills here. Though it would make the aforementioned dad subplot scarier, but again I completely missed that one.

So again maybe it’s brilliant and I just didn’t get all of it, or maybe it’s just fine with some some artistic/artsy ambition because that’s the kind of movie they wanted to make, which is totally fair. Kind of think it’s the latter.

The soundtrack is quite good though, gj Disasterpeace. Incidentally has done more video game music than movie music— the creator of It Follows approached him after liking his soundtrack for the game Fez.

Also I’m sure working with a low budget was a creative constraint but it never feels like a problem in the movie, there’s never a time where it doesn’t feel like they were able to do what they set out to do, no bad or cheesy effects or whatever.