[Review]FrightFest: Follow Her
Many horror films have come out this year that feel the need to wrestle with men’s dynamic with women, particularly within the context of the genre. The “unsupportive boyfriend/husband” trope has been used in horror quite often, critically and sometimes with sympathy. Men and Fresh were two 2022 horror films particularly on my mind while watching Follow Her, a film centered on an abusive creative relationship between a man and a woman he has hired to help him finish his script. But where this film succeeds is in not taking itself too seriously. It doesn’t feel like a condemnation of our social media age or any similar tired cliché. It just feels like a fun b-movie that wants to be what it is, while playing with contemporary fears and meta-genre commentary. Follow Her would’ve felt right at home with the ’90s self-aware horror releases that were interested in being horror movies before bits of commentary.
The film follows Jess (Dani Barker, also the screenwriter) the first chunk of the film, a vlogger gaining popularity on the film’s pretend social media. This is probably the weakest portion, Jess simply isn’t a complex enough character that we need a lot of setup to understand. The plot meanders while unpacking her family trauma and explaining her videos in which she responds to Craigslist ads seeking women for odd jobs and susses out if they’re complete scams. But the film kicks into gear when she responds to an ad looking for a woman to bring a feminine perspective to a Hitchcockian thriller.
Tom is cute and fairly charming in his own awkward way. It’s hard to fault Jess for agreeing to go to his house in the woods or being charmed by its rustic sparseness. It’s only when he breaks out the script he claims is “almost finished” that she realizes something is wrong. It’s only three pages and is a fairly rough sketch of the last hour or so, ending with the declaration that one of them is a killer and one of them will be killed. Tom then eagerly announces he wants to finish writing the project with some improv, with the two of them acting as their characters would.
This begins the cat-and-mouse game structure that makes up the meat of the film, with Tom playing the role of abusive creator and Jess that of collaborator trying her best to make it work. Luke Cook as Tom plays off tropes of abusive people on film sets, encouraging Jess to push past her comfort zones in order for his art to achieve realism. But the film isn’t all simple one-to-one filmmaking metaphors as Jess has questionable artistic practices of her own. Her content is built on exposing people she films without their consent, although she tries to obscure their faces as much as possible. Tom is quick to point this out when she begs him to understand her as a person, claiming that she refused others the same opportunity. “You fuck with people all the time!” he retorts in a climactic scene. The fact that the men he thinks of as Jess’s victims are themselves often trying to prey on women never crosses his mind. This is all a game to him, just him fucking with someone, in his own words.
The last act of the film is built on a series of twists that are too enjoyable to give away. I love when a horror film gives you a fake ending and you hope to yourself “oh god, please don’t leave it on a note this simple”, only for the filmmakers to be a few steps ahead, preparing a trap for the characters to fall into. The twists take a fun but standard meta-Hitchcock riff into a dark web-style den of sin I wasn’t prepared for. This is the first entry into horror for both writer Barker and director Sylvia Caminer, and both are talents I hope stick around the genre. Follow Her isn’t afraid to embrace silly tropes and over-the-top line deliveries (I’ll be thinking about Luke Cook’s reading of “toe in mouth NOW” for a good while) because it knows that's what makes horror memorable. Follow Her isn’t trying to make any big statements about trauma or technology or a new generation. It’s just here to have a good time.