FOLLOWERS is meant to be a "twisty" movie, so one has to be especially careful about spoilers. A central question it asks is how easy it would be to harm social media personalities, given that they open up much of their private lives for public consumption?
After an unsettling prologue, this found footage movie opens by giving a fast run of the development of two people from humble beginnings as internet nobodies to social media celebrities, their meeting each other and becoming a couple.
Being young, fit, beautiful and successful, they seem like an ideal couple, but the movie reveals soon that at least some of it is just appearances (as one might expect). In particular, they go on a camping trip during which it becomes especially clear how far apart they really are. At the conclusion of the first act, they are attacked at the camping site by what appear to be two thugs. This is followed by a major plot twist, so I will say no more.
The basic idea behind this movie is actually very good, and the execution of this idea at least for much of the second act is also not too bad. But then, it introduces a second major twist at the end of the second act which, though not inherently bad, is executed quite poorly.
If there ever was a movie example that makes a strong case for filming a movie as a combination of found footage and narrative footage, I think this is it. That is not even a new idea: the granddaddy of found footage movies, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980) is actually a narrative footage/found footage combo.
As best as I can tell, a lot of the considerable problems in the third act stem from the film's insistence on remaining a found footage movie. Had it switched along with the second major twist to a narrative movie, it would have been for example a lot easier to characterize the unexpected new threat. As it is, all we have a is poor caricature.
Simply put, when there is a group of characters in a found footage movie who do not film themselves, then this presents a challenge because the only possibility left to still have them in the movie is to have them be filmed by others. Many found footage films overcome this challenge by using plot devices such as having a security camera in each room of a house and so on, but it is hard to implement this when the setting is out in the woods. All that is left is filming the group members from a distance, which makes it virtually impossible to get a sense of who they are, what they want and why we should care.
So what we have, then, is a very good idea with an okay execution of the first two acts and a nosedive of the third. That is really a pity, especially since the third act actually gives a new and unexpected meaning to the movie's title.
