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It Follows
When Phil Fish asked Disasterpeace to make the soundtrack to his magnificent indie adventure game Fez, he told him he wants something that sounds like “chiptune Vangelis”. Disasterpeace fulfilled a fantasy there, but he did not make a Vangelis out of it. Instead, he gave birth to a vast and warped world of puzzles, not for, but through Gomez, the player-character’s brain.
There is a considerable distance to walk from the twisted-yet-calming enigma of Fez to Richard Vreeland’s score for It Follows. But somehow both works strangely meet in more than a few coordinations. It Follows is director David Robert Mitchell’s sophomore film depicting the supernatural horror of living in the fear of being murdered by anyone who is approaching you. At moments, there is a ’90s Ghost-World-y teen artistry to it, and happens to be an entertaining watch. But that was not the only reason we gave it a go.
What did not surprise us was Disasterpeace’s pixelated trademark over the eerie canvas of Mitchell’s alone-in-the-dark and dreary atmospheres. In Fez, Gomez had to go through an array of math and cryptography, discover a new physical dimension previously unknown to humans, and figure out what a quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog can possibly mean. And s/he did it all in almost complete solitude. It was sad at moments and made us reflect on life as a mere struggle towards survival. It Follows has a vague glimmer…
