Follow Her review.
Follow Her continues the pattern of movie releases with confusing messages about social media. But it does so while having a lot of fun.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Follow Her
Directed by Sylvia Caminer
Written by Dani Barker
Starring Dani Barker, Luke Cook, Eliana Jones and Mark Moses
Follow Her Review
There is a moment in the third act of Follow Her that puts a thoughtful spin on the common messaging of these types of movies. Our protagonist is tied to a chair in front of a camera that is live streaming to her followers. The antagonist painfully rips out the extensions carefully woven into her hair. Her fake eyelashes are the next to go. Without hammering the point until your eyes roll back…Follow Her makes clear its message that the person you see online isn’t who they appear to be. That’s the prevailing message of these types of movies. It’s been done better than it is done in Follow Her. But it’s been done far worse.
Jess (Dani Barker) is a down on her luck internet personality. Relying on livestream revenue to get by, she takes jobs servicing clients fetishes and filming them without their knowledge. When a video she uploads accidentally reveals the identity of a client Jess is faced with a choice. Take down the video…or let its popularity catapult her into higher earning potential. When she takes a job as a writing partner for the charismatic Tom (Luke Cook) Jess discovers the script is all about her.
Follow Her is one of those movies that doesn’t have enough subplots to throw you off its endgame. It does an admirable job trying…but you’re only given the information that’s going to end up relevant so there can’t be any red herrings. It’s a testament to its commitment to relying on unexpected moments that the first two acts are as entertaining as they are. Even if there is little doubt what is ultimately behind the plot…Follow Her offers a lot of fun getting to it.
Barker and Cook have good chemistry. They also get a lot to play with in what essentially becomes a two person play for a majority of Follow Her. The moment when Jess reads Tom’s script and discovers that it recaps their own meeting and interactions is a great hook. The movie carries on with the idea by putting the characters into a situation where they are working out the rest of the script through improv. It allows Tom to walk the line between playful and menacing. Jess vacillates between being in control and feeling cornered.
The story picks up steam as it heads towards a sloppy conclusion. Before it gets there, however, it presents a ride worth taking. We know Jess is in trouble. Even Jess knows she’s in trouble even as she convincingly plays along. We even know why. If you spend any time thinking about it, anyway. But that doesn’t mean that Follow Her doesn’t have some tricks up its sleeve. Unexpected moves moment to moment gives the movie a great pace and sustains interest.
There is a false climax that would have served as a better ending than Follow Her eventually settles on. Like Deinfluencer before it, Follow Her can’t help but get on a soap box about something that applies to an incredibly small number of people. It’s not that the message is bad…it’s that we’ve heard it all before. It’s also difficult to connect to protagonists when the ultimate message is always that they’re phony and bad. The ending here isn’t as blatantly stupid as Deinfluencer’s…but it comes from the same basic idea.
Luckily, unlike Deinfluencer, Follow Her gives us a good reason to stick with the story until the end. The leads are very good, and the story has some genuinely interesting and surprising moments. At least until it ends up taking us exactly where we expected it to all along. Internet personalities are phony and social media is bad. There…I saved the next movie the trouble.
Scare Value
I’m going to be honest…I don’t understand what most of these parables about internet stardom are trying to say. Yes…social media is bad. Yes…internet personalities are phony. All of that is already widely accepted. For some reason we get multiple movies every year with nothing else to say about it. Sissy did it best. Influencer took an interesting angle on it. Deinfluencer is a disaster. Follow Her has more fun with it than most…but still doesn’t have anything new to say.
3/5
Follow Her Links
Rent/Buy on VOD from VUDU and Amazon
