When Follow begins, it’s a few days before Christmas in Austin, Texas, and average-guy bartender Quinn is eagerly anticipating hearing if he’s gotten into Columbia University. His quirky girlfriend, Thana, is afraid that if he does, he’ll leave her behind when he leaves Austin. Meanwhile, young co-worker Viv is obviously crushing on Quinn. So far, so mumble-core, but while the aesthetic of this film is definitely micro-micro-budget, this isn’t an indie dramedy. Because Thana decides to bring a gun into sex with Quinn as a way to add an edgy charge to the encounter. Next thing we know, Quinn’s waking up the next morning and he can’t quite remember what happened the night before because he drank a little too much. But he knows two things for damn sure; that pesky gun is in his hand and his girlfriend is dead on the floor, a bullet in her head. I was expecting more of a mystery element here and there is some slight mystery because we don’t know exactly what happened when Thana was shot and we do eventually find out, but I was expecting more than that. But instead what we get is a really claustrophobic, feverish and quite disturbing movie as Quinn, utterly shattered by Thana’s violent death, just can’t bring himself to leave the house or call anyone and so, as the movie counts down the days to Christmas, we just watch Quinn utterly lose his **** as he wanders around his house as his girlfriend lies dead in one of the rooms. After a couple of opening scenes, the entire movie really takes place in and around the house and it’s probably a good thing that this movie is only about seventy-five minutes because it genuinely doesn’t have a lot of plot and also it’s just a pretty unpleasant experience.
I feel like this is a movie that’s just totally off the radar and that’s kind of surprising because it’s got a bit of indie cred. Writer-director Egerton has gone on to direct several more cult movies and publish a few horror novels. Quinn is played, extremely well, by Noah Segan, an actor you will probably recognize from literally every Rian Johnson movie. You might also, as a weird side note, remember Segan from his role in a somewhat more infamous horror movie, Deadgirl. So, Segan should be grateful for Rian Johnson because, otherwise, I feel like Segan would be mostly known for his necrophilia adjacent content, which is a fate I wish on no-one. Most surprising of all to me was Haley Lu Richardson, now a certified indie-darling, and rightfully so, as Viv. This was 2015; the following year was when she’d show up as a scene-stealer in both Edge of Seventeen and Split and then the year after that she starred opposite John Cho in Columbus, a movie I absolutely adore. So, she’s right on the cusp here and she’s really good; like I said, Segan is good, but as far as everybody else, it’s just obvious that Richardson is the cast-member here with the talent and charisma to break-out. And one should call out Donnie Most from Happy Days as the cranky landlord; that was weird to see.
Anyway, there’s a lot I really like about this movie. Segan does a good job with a premise that requires him to essentially be on screen the entire film and we’re right there with him as he slowly progresses from normal dude to a haggard, shambling wreck, his emotional and psychological break exacerbated by a slow slide back into alcoholism. This movie is clearly saying something about being trapped in a dead-end relationship, but it’s also kind of about addiction; when the movie starts Quinn is a recovered alcoholic, but then a brief relapse leads to his girlfriend’s death which then leads to a full-on, days-long binge. I like the structure of the movie; it uses flashbacks to fill in the character of Thana, the dead girlfriend, and as the movie progresses we start to understand the reasons she brought that gun to bed with her – she has a romantic fascination with death. And the film does a lot with just that one death at the beginning of the movie; it kind of restores the horror of death. As Quinn wanders around in a daze, he seems to alternately feel drawn to the body of his girlfriend and repulsed by it. He might try to hide it or he might just sit and stare into her dead eyes, but either way, we feel the weight of it, of this one death, of what it must be like to be alone in a house with a corpse. The biggest knock on the movie is just how dreadfully cheap it looks, but perhaps this adds to the unpleasantness of the experience which is, perversely, the biggest success of the movie. It’s a movie that makes the viewer uncomfortable and as Thana’s body breaks down, so does Quinn’s mind and so, in some really disturbing ways, do the barriers between them. I used the phrase “necrophilia adjacent” above and that is what it is; it never actually goes there, but the movie wants you to have the queasy feeling that it could, that if someone doesn’t get to Quinn and get him out of that house, well . . .
It’s got some good scares, the best probably involving a power surge that knocks out the lights and the ensuing scene, and a great, unsettling score by Kazimir Boyle. It’s a horror film for sure and, while I feel it doesn’t quite achieve the catharsis of real art, I can’t shake the fact that it did make me really uncomfortable and when it was over, it was a relief, like a fever breaking. It has a great climactic scene and then, unfortunately, goes for about five more minutes and the final scene was almost comedic to me. But the sick atmosphere can’t be denied. You may end up wondering, as I kind of did, if the point of it all really justified it, but, if you watch it, you won’t forget it any time soon. It’s a weird claustrophobic movie and, while it isn’t one I see myself ever revisiting, I’m glad I watched it. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – weird, painfully cheap indie-horror finds a man trapped with the corpse of his girlfriend and things get bad; unsettling, atmospheric and memorable, even if imperfect. 3 ½ stars.