"They Follow": A Summer Movie with a Taste of the Past, but Little More
Anne Hathaway stars in David Robert Mitchell's latest film. While it serves as a well-crafted, nostalgic homage to 80s cinema, the movie ultimately falls short due to underdeveloped characters, a predictable ending, and significant logical flaws.
Hollywood loves to take indie directors who have created successful, convention-breaking films and integrate them into the studio machine. Sometimes this works perfectly, blending a director's unique voice with top-tier commercial cinema—think Ryan Coogler’s Creed, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, or Destin Daniel Cretton’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Other times, the machine strips away what made the director special, producing a polished but unmemorable product. This is the case with David Robert Mitchell and his new film, They Follow.
Robert Mitchell first caught the public's attention with the surreal horror film It Follows, which masterfully played with genre tropes to create an atmospheric, mesmerizing experience. His follow-up, the 2018 mystery thriller Under the Silver Lake, became lost in its own complexity and failed both critically and commercially. After a long hiatus, Warner Bros. gave him an $80 million budget to bring an original concept to life: what if an entire neighborhood traveled back in time to the Mesozoic era, some 200 million years ago? It is essentially Jurassic Park meets The Twilight Zone.
As he did in It Follows, Mitchell takes familiar suburban life and introduces an inexplicable threat, though this time the approach feels far more conventional. The story begins in the early 80s, in a well-kept home where Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denis (Anne Hathaway) live with their two children. Greg, much like his character in the currently playing Sweet Dreams, hides his unemployment from his family while working as a pizza delivery driver. Their marriage is fraying, and they seem on the verge of divorce. The routine shatters when prehistoric flora appears in a neighbor’s garden, followed by a blinding light that transports the entire neighborhood back to the age of dinosaurs. The family must then navigate a tropical jungle, escaping predators while attempting to rediscover their bond.
It is impossible to deny that They Follow is a well-directed piece of entertainment that will satisfy fans of 80s-style adventure films. The setting is no accident: the naive plot, the coming-of-age themes, and the shots that directly recreate beloved 80s aesthetics appeal to those who long for a simpler decade. However, it remains nothing more than a nice homage, paling in comparison to the great films of that era. While it is certainly better than most Jurassic World entries, that is hardly a high bar.
The film’s fundamental problem is that it falls between two stools: it is too childish in spirit for an adult audience, yet its horror elements may be too intense for younger viewers. The characters lack depth (with the exception of McGregor, who is incapable of a bad performance), and the ending is predictable and riddled with logical inconsistencies. As a summer movie intended to clear the head with a taste of the past, it works; it just doesn't offer much beyond that.
