When Follow Her landed on my doormat (metaphorically speaking; my postbox isn’t anywhere near my doormat), I did my usual thing and tried finding some info on it. Whilst I do enjoy the challenge of stumbling into a new film totally in the dark, if I can get the measure of it first it saves time.

Well, this one showed me. A psychological thriller, I thought, smiling darkly to myself. Girl answers a stranger’s ad in the classifieds, gets tangled up in a revenge plot. I can live with that. But no, no–not that simple, and certainly not that predictable.

Jess (Dani Barker) lives a charmed existence in a dad-owned apartment, earning a sporadic, rather mean-spirited living by answering classified ads and creating live video streams, thereby proving the ads either to be genuine, or exposing them as a smokescreen for more nefarious objectives. Then dad and haughty stepmum drop the bomb; she needs a more reliable income, and her days in the apartment are numbered. Desperately searching the classifieds once more, she happens upon potential gold; script writer required, $100 just for showing up.

Enter Tom Brady (Luke Cook). Good-looking, charming, intelligent and intense, he instantly clicks with Jess, and off they go to his remote converted barn to discuss the script.

Things get weird when it transpires that he expects them to improvise and write the entire thing from scratch, the one proviso being that one of them must die. And that’s just the tip of the WTF iceberg. Is he serious? How dedicated is he to his cause of writing a groundbreaking script? Is this film itself serious? Or are we (viewers and Jess alike) being played as prey all along?

Tom likes to have fun. He pre-warned Jess of this when they first met. Now, given the manic turn things begin to take as the improvised screenplay begins we’re swept along with Jess in that sense of knowing ANYTHING may happen.

Is Tom innovative? Nuts? A murderer? Like this movie, I’m giving little away, except to say stay on your toes. The entire film is an endlessly shapeshifting maze as cleverly crafted and smoothly polished as the character of Tom himself, with a strong moral point to make.

The use of mayhem to underline the pitfalls of hypocrisy, fakeness, attention-garnering, and other undesirable human traits (particularly relevant in these days of social media gone wild) put me somewhat in mind of the Creep films, as well as Fight Club, in both of which there’s a major theme of the desire to blow superficiality out of the water and get real.

While this style of movie (often with those who push the boundaries of privacy, good taste and ethics being taught a lesson) is not at all unexplored, director Sylvia Caminer’s Follow Her rates super-high on the scale for spiky and lightning-fast pacing. There’s a rich vein of black comedy too, which not only amuses, but adds to the puzzle; is this meant to be a lighthearted or precautionary tale?

You make the call. Follow Her; but watch your step.

This film screened as part of Fantaspoa 2022. For more information on the festival, please visit www.fantaspoa.com.

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