Follow Me – Overview/ Review (with Spoilers)

Who doesn’t want to experience love? Who doesn’t want to feel special? Who doesn’t want someone they can trust with their secrets, their dreams of the future, and have that person be just as vulnerable to share their own? This is the hope you walk into whenever a possible romance begins. What happens when those rose-colored glasses are taken off?

Trigger Warning(s)

Contains Sexual Assault

Characters & Story

An unnamed girl and an unnamed boy, they look so cute. It’s Black love, the stuff you dream of seeing. They walk hand and hand, her touches her lower back gently. She smiles. They smoke weed together, and then something changes. She never saw it coming.

Highlights

You Own Horror Movie

Being that it is October, we expect to see horror icons either have their latest films released, or the trailers put out there to begin that chill down your spine. Yet, for some, supernatural monsters aren’t the things they fear. Sometimes it is an ex-boyfriend, a former friend, maybe a stranger, if not a family member. In some cases, they were nice once. However, they did something unthinkable. Since that moment, the same haunting that you would expect from any horror icon you can name they match. Be it the feeling they are always there, lurking in the shadows, that unknown footsteps can be theirs, all that we have seen Jason, Michael Myers, Freddy, and the countless others do, that person finds a way to surpass them. After all, they are real.

Not only that, you trusted them. You let them take you away from your own home to a place secluded because you never thought they were capable of doing you any harm. Now they have taken away so much from you. They have taken that ability to trust someone, to not question their intentions, the ability to have an intimate moment alone and not be guarded. Something felt, without words, without fluid action but just a handful of frames, within 5 minutes.

Low Points

It’s Too Short Too Critique

What is given here is an idea, a thought, a handful of moments collected into presenting just enough to make a point, or story, for you to get the idea. With that, it is hard to craft a criticism unless you are a technical person. Which, because I’m not, all I can do is praise this.

Overall: Worth Seeing – Recommended

Follow Me is perhaps the most triggering thing I have ever seen and without any blood, without screeches which echo through the room. It is like, and I say this as someone who was molested, you going back to that memory and questioning when did you go wrong? You go step by step, moment by moment, trying to pin down when you should have known. Yet, no matter how many times you rewind those snapshot moments, the surprise remains. The pain remains. They remain. For you can wash off their sweat, their scent, and any fluid which may have been in or on you, yet they are always there. Like you’d expect Jesus or God to be, they are always watching you.

All of this, this uneasy feeling, what may draw a flashback within you, comes within less than 5 minutes. Truly a statement of auteur Brianne Faison’s ability to tell a story. God help us all if she was given the time and resources to produce a full-length film. Though even with that said, and not being a horror movie person, I would take some tissues, prepare to scream and do my best to ignore the hairs standing as she, with a scalpel’s edge, dissects what she needs to make me feel, to make me hurt, and probably leave me a blubbering mess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buEYvjRf1vs&app=desktop