by Joel Harley
Inspired by her own adventures as a YouTube personality – having created and starred in the Starvival docu-series – influencer slash actress slash filmmaker Dani Barker stars as influencer Jess Peters, eking out a living by replying to creepy Personal ads online.
Fresh from being tied up and tickled by a man claiming to be making a chewing gum commercial (sure), Jess seizes upon her next project. Her next audition is with Tom Brady (Luke Cook); a man looking for help in finishing his erotic screenplay.
After hitting it off with Tom in a remote park, Jess heads back to his even-more-remote shack, where the aggressive flirting kicks up a notch. Clearly, there’s something fishy about Tom Brady, but Jess isn’t being entirely honest either (secretly filming his ‘audition’ for her fans). It’s a tense, kinky game of cat-and-mouse, but who is taking advantage of who here?
Directing Barker’s screenplay, Sylvia Caminer delivers a sharp new erotic thriller for our day and age – among the best of the horror films about influencers that have popped up in recent years. Barker harnesses her own experience with the subject matter (most relevantly, Starvival: $50 an hour to be tickled) to create a heroine who’s both incredibly savvy and massively naive all at once.
Layering subversion upon subversion until it becomes a version of the thing it was subverting in the first place, Follow Her struggles to land the final stretch, but strong performances and writing carry it through.
FOLLOW HER is out now on demand in the US via the streaming service Quiver.
