GEM Entertainment. 2020.
Follow Me is in Berlin cinemas now! Photo: GEM Entertainment
There’s very little going for Will Wernick’s insultingly derivative horror-thriller, except from the fact that it brazenly operates as if Hostel, Saw and David Fincher’s unfairly underrated The Game never existed. And that’s a level of misguided nerve that’s borderline heroic.
Follow Me sees a nose-bleedingly annoying bunch of vlogging influencers with barely the collective character definition of a Lego brick, led by Cole (Keegan Allen), head to Moscow for the ultimate “escape game experience”. There, they’ll fight to survive a game that may not be a game after all… It’s essentially a clichéd spin-off of Wernick’s 2017 Escape Room, one that has nothing new to offer in the scare or thrills department, and even less to say about influencers and their braincell-eroding “Woah, so much content!” antics. It doesn’t even have the decency to come up with any exciting traps or torments for our hapless protagonists; at one point, Wernick even pilfers the Die Hard With A Vengeance water riddle and thinks the lack of originality can be excused by simply namechecking John McTiernan’s 1995 actioner. Make no mistake - by the time the predictable ending rolls around, you’ll wish you’d rewatched The Game and/or Die Hard With A Vengeance instead. Unfollow.
Follow Me / Directed by Will Wernick (US, 2020), with Keegan Allen, Holland Roden, Ronen Rubinstein. Starts August 20.