It’s hard to say if Eresha Sale is a promising director or an extremely talented visual poet. His project, ‘It Follows‘, is not your typical short film, depicting a nocturnal hallucination, with a dark and magnetic aesthetics through which the director explores the inner abyss of people aggressed by phobia or schizophrenia. Without adopting a conventional epic thread, this experimental project is a poetic incursion into the dreamlike chimeras of a character who is haunted by phantasmagorical demonic presences that invade even his daily reality. Inspired by the meditative pictorial aesthetics of directors such as Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, or Ingmar Bergman, Eresha Sale builds a misty, fluid, almost Gothic universe populated by symbols and terrifying shadows that fascinated us through the almost mathematical care that the image is grounded on. Without using a classical discursive interaction, this nonverbal short film is a broad sensory composition that synthesizes, through colourless panoramas, slow movements and suggestive musical inflexions, a gloomy and obsessive atmosphere, a metaphor of loneliness that defines the unhappy destiny of the ones for whom the world is an indestructible carceral space.
The somewhat anti-narrative strategy of this short film impedes us to offer in words a defining insight into its universe. A young man wanders through a deserted park, in the middle of a misty day, meeting at every step statuary ghoulish silhouettes that silently watch every movement. This agonizing wandering through the gothic vegetal universe of this terrifying space will follow the protagonist even after he wakes up, when he tries to desperately find the reason why the same demonic presence invades his own intimacy.
Created on a principle of duality that opposes the nocturnal register (the colourless, viscous, misty dream) with the diurnal register (which, through a sickly chromatic, renders the thrilling existence of the protagonist captive in their own home), Eresha Sale’s short film is a poetic incursion into the fears of the individual overwhelmed by an acute sense of alienation. Without proposing to create a canonical story about the terror of the individual awestruck by the whims of existence, the director manages to create a hallucinating, both terrifying and captivating, experiment, a metaphorical radiography of the soul of a human condemned to loneliness. ‘It Follows’ is one of those projects of atmosphere, based on a somewhat universal narrative formula that succeeds through the poeticism of images to fascinate any category of audience familiar with the sensation of existential void caused by the irremediable phobia of isolation.
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