Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Sylvia Caminer
Starring: Dani Barker, Luke Cook, Eliana Jones, Mark
Moses
In the wake of the MeToo movement we've seen a slew of indie thrillers
that play out cat and mouse battles of the sexes in confined locations
(A Wounded Fawn,
Scare Me,
Stalker
et al). Director Sylvia Caminer's feature debut
Follow Her gives us more to chew on than the simplistic
"women good, men bad" message of many of its peers, with a female
protagonist who is far from infallible.
The film's writer, Dani Barker, takes the lead role of Jess, a
New York based wannabe actress who lives off her lawyer father's money
while residing in his apartment in the city. Jess, who is a little too
old for such an arrangement, wants to be independent, and supplements
her income by performing as a dominatrix on a live streaming platform
named Live Hive. She's amassed a decent amount of followers – seen in
onscreen messages as a mix of horny men and encouraging women – but to
make any real money she needs to get into the site's Top 10 streamers.
While her onscreen persona is that of a powerful queen, off screen Jess
has the demeanour of a woman who's permanently walking home from a bad
one night stand in broken heels.
Jess meets her male clients in various locations and indulges in
S&M play. What her clients don’t realise is that she secretly films
their encounters (usually with a pair of those Google glasses thingies –
how are they legal???) and later posts the videos on Live Hive. To
protect their identity she blurs out their faces, but when the software
responsible fails on one video and briefly exposes a client's face she
finds herself in a panic. A message to tech support is met with a reply
that it will take five business days to respond. Does Dani do the right
thing and delete the video? Nope, not with its views skyrocketing,
becoming her most popular video and edging her closer to that elusive
Top 10.
Amid her newfound fame, Dani seemingly enjoys another stroke of luck,
receiving a reply to a screenwriting gig she applied for. The nominal
director, Tom (Luke Cook), asks to meet Jess in a secluded park
upstate. Jess should see red flags flying in the New York sky but she's
become so accustomed to dominating men that she believes she can handle
herself. Plus, it turns out Tom is a total hunk with a dreamy Australian
accent, so she gladly follows him to his home, a barn in the middle of
the woods.
If you think you know where this is all headed, think again. Sure, Tom
comes off like a creepy weirdo whose behaviour would send most women
running, but Jess isn't most women. The sexually progressive Jess is
perfectly fine with the idea that Tom might have simply lured her to his
home for the sake of getting her into bed, as she's accustomed to being
in control of sexual scenarios. For all the warning signs, she simply
views Tom as another little boy who will end up tied to a bed and
submitting to her whims. Plus, while Tom was printing off his barely
formed screenplay, Jess secretly set up hidden cameras around his home
in the hopes of capturing some juicy content.
While Tom and Jess engage in a form of psycho-sexual one-upmanship that
we can't quite figure is sinister or playful, Caminer starts subtly
directing our attention to what else might be at play here. The
widescreen format is used to tease details in the background, and while
we're certain Jess is oblivious to them, we're unsure if the same can be
said of Tom. As their dance continues, we're left to figure out who is
the predator and who is the prey in this scenario.
Follow Her is fully aware of how flawed its protagonist
is, even interrogating her actions and motivations in a final act which
ups the ante. Some may feel the men Jess exploits deserve everything
they get, but such people should ask themselves how they would feel if
the sexes were reversed and a man was secretly filming his sexual
encounters with unsuspecting women. What's so canny about
Follow Her is how it introduces us to Jess through the
lens of her dedicated followers and her own twisted idea of what it
means to be a strong, independent woman, only to later force us to
question why we're rooting for this pretty awful person. It's a daring
move, but a refreshing one amid a rash of movies that patronisingly
paint women as strong and independent or as victims. Caminer and Barker
understand that you can create a strong, compelling female protagonist
without making her aspirational, that there are awful, manipulative,
sociopathic people in the world, some of whom happen to be women.
