Spoilers Alert:
“Escape Room” meets “Hostel” – director Will Wernick is using this crude mixture to attract viewers in mid-August. It’s probably his that he’s the only one to use the horror genre FOLLOW ME produce decent numbers. We reveal in our review whether the quality could also contribute to this.
Cole’s friends are also big in the social media business.
Visually, “Follow Me” may also have been inspired by “Hostel”. The muddy gray-brown in which the twenty-somethings fight their way through the escape room, which is reminiscent of slaughter rooms and torture chambers (camera: Jason Goodell, “Ouija: Origin of Evil”), makes the events on screen seem ugly and unpleasant at all times. An adventure flair like in Will Wernick’s “Escape Room” gives way to sheer terror – the idea of puzzle prisons soon no longer plays a role, as the film makes no secret from the start that something is going terribly wrong here. But the break between the lurid, good-humored internet videos and the hardcore horror scenario was quite exciting in the first half hour, but from now on everything follows a regular genre pattern – even the sudden appearance of the masked butchers no longer causes goosebumps. Simply because it’s so predictable that once again you’re much more likely to want to reprimand the young victims for why they didn’t just turn around or hide in time. Whether you still want to praise the makers for trying something new for 2020 or question the use of outdated motifs is up to you. This year, “Follow Me” is at least unrivaled.
“In ‘Saw’ and ‘Hostel’ there was more creative torture than in ‘Follow Me’.
If you’re wondering what the film title “Follow Me” actually means, you’ll probably have guessed from the description of the characters that it’s certainly related to the topic of social networks. And in his film, Will Wernick actually attempts a bitter criticism of rapid internet fame – very similar to what “Nerve” tried to do a few years ago. To do this, he relies on a sledgehammer twist that not even the Netflix series “Black Mirror” would have used. It may actually catch the viewer off guard at the end of the film – something that can’t be said of every film twist – but Wernick now really beats the message, which has only now been chosen as the pivotal point, into his audience. And it will bypass the Internet-obsessed target group anyway.
Conclusion: Will Wernick dared something and didn’t lose everything – given his wild mix of different horror film genres, that’s probably more than one could expect.
“Follow Me” can be seen in USA cinemas from August 20th.
