It Follows

Jay sleeps with a young man named Hugh after a date in Detroit. Afterward he chloroforms her, restrains her in an abandoned building, and explains what he has done to her with the flat resignation of someone passing on a debt he is glad to be rid of. A slow-moving entity will now walk toward her, always, taking the shape of strangers or people she knows. It cannot be stopped by locks or distance for long — it will find her wherever she goes. If it reaches her it will kill her, and then turn back to him. The only way to pass it on is to sleep with someone else.

Jay returns to her Detroit neighbourhood and tells her friends — her sister Kelly, childhood friend Paul, a boy named Greg, a girl named Yara who reads from a clamshell e-reader throughout. The entity appears as strangers at first, then as people Jay knows in wrong configurations — her father's body moving through a school corridor, a tall woman walking through a party no one else reacts to. It is slow, patient, and completely real to anyone who has been infected.

Jay sleeps with Greg to pass the entity on. It reaches Greg and he dies. It returns to Jay. The friends attempt to destroy it — luring it to a swimming pool and electrocuting the water. It is wounded but continues. Jay shoots it. It bleeds. It keeps walking.

The film ends with Jay and Paul in a relationship, walking together on a Detroit street. Behind them, in the distance, a figure follows. The camera does not cut away. The figure maintains its pace.