A camera pans in and we're off the blocks. We're in suburbia and the early Autumn leaves have already turned brown. A girl runs screaming from the house and makes a run for the car. We cut to the following morning and she doesn't look quite so well and for now, nothing is explained. We move on to a new group led by the nubile blond haired Jay (Maika Monroe, looking like a young domestic Chloe Sevigny). They're a normal bunch of kids, made up of Jay, her younger sister, their long friend Paul and the bookish bespectacled Yara.
Jay goes to the flicks with a boy and one thing naturally leads to the other. The pair wind down in the back seat of a car before the boy pulls a chloroform rag and proceeds to knock Jay out. She wakes up tied to a chair with her date in the room. He explains that he's given her a curse of some sort and that her only chance of salvation is to have sex as soon as she can to pass it on. The curse sets a malevolent ghostly specter loose who slowly chases its victims down in whatever form it so pleases to take. We spend the remainder of the film on edge wondering exactly who will be getting it (so to speak) next.
David Robert Mitchell broke onto the scene at SXSW back in 2010 where he picked up a special jury award for The Myth of the American Sleepover, another film with fresh views on these particular growing pains. His work immediately brings to mind luminaries like John Carpenter, Wes Craven and Dario Argento but there is a clear freshness to this voice which we expect to hear more of.
What is the young man getting at. Is it a comment on the reckless attitude to sexually transmitted diseases? Or perhaps on the lengths some people are willing to go...
Our interest has been piqued Mr. Mitchell. We'll be keeping an eye.
