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Review: There's something unsettling about this film from the opening scene itself. The premise, as described above, reads plainly enough on paper. Jay's sister Kelly (Sepe) and friends Paul (Gilchrist), Yara (Luccardi) and Greg (Zovatto) empathize and try to help her.
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The entity follows Jay with a chilling relentlessness - emerging from a crowd as an old lady, from a forest at night as a naked woman or in a tiny bedroom as an eight foot tall man with eyes gouged out. No one else can see 'it'.
Mitchell's direction creates a sense of unknowing; that something is happening off-camera and we can only guess. In one scene, the camera pans through 720 degrees, where we at one point see 'it' approaching a building Jay is in. When the camera returns to that spot, it's nowhere to be seen. Stuff like this plays on your mind later on. Did it enter that building?
The entity itself inspires dread. Not only can it assume the form of any person - a parent included - but you wonder what the hell it really is? Scarier still is its Terminator-like persistence. Jay realizes that even if she takes time off to rest or sleep, it only gives the entity more time to reach her. Jay might 'transfer' it to someone else like a demonic STD, but when those people are killed by the entity, it will come back to her again - a claustrophobic loop of a living nightmare.
Mitchell's deliberately disjointed narrative and ambiguous timelines add to the surrealism. There's a chance you might, at night, catch yourself looking over your shoulder more than once after watching this.