Review: Them That Follow Tidily Assesses Appalachia’s Generational Poverty

Throughout Them That Follow, writer-directors Brittany Poulton and Dan Madison Savage depict Appalachia by surrounding their characters with the signifiers of a seemingly unbreakable cycle of generational poverty. Not a single vehicle in the film looks like it was manufactured after Reagan left office, with rust dappling their exteriors like acne scars. Local stores use their signs not to advertise their wares but offer assurances that they take food stamps, while ancient light bulbs cast a jaundiced glow throughout the film’s interior spaces. Such sights aren’t new to cinema about this region, but Poulton and Savage never linger on these images for their own sake, instead using glimpses of the film’s suffocating milieu to better illustrate their main character’s lack of agency.

Them That Follow begins with Mara (Alice Englert) and Augie (Thomas Mann) hiking through the woods to reach a tangle of rattlesnakes ominously basking on a mound of rocks. Far from fearing the reptiles, the young couple ogle them while awkwardly flirting with each other. Eventually, the source of their fascination with and lack of fear around snakes is made clear, as the pair belongs to a community of parishioners of a Pentecostal snake-handling church. What’s more, Mara is the daughter of the local pastor, Lemuel (Walton Goggins).

The perverse idyll that opens the film is soon revealed to be a flashback to happier times. When the story picks up in the present, the lovebirds are estranged from each other. Augie has broken from the church, having grown uneasy with its primitivism and the dangers of its snake rituals. His alienation from the church thus separates him from the community and from Mara, who’s become engaged to the devout Garret (Lewis Pullman). Despite being betrothed to Mara, Garret talks to her as if he barely knows her, his virginal inexperience evident in the manner in which he insistently fawns over his idealized image of her as a devoted bride-to-be, oblivious to her obvious misery and anxiety. Resigned to a marriage that appears all but outright arranged by her father, Mara still pines for Augie, and their clandestine past relationship hangs portentously over her seemingly predestined future.

Them That Follow, which is fixated on the intense rituals of Lemuel’s church and its cult-like games of devotion and ostracism, assiduously depicts the ways that people abandoned by government and society at large have no choice but to band together, and how the trap of poverty creates a black hole from which few can escape. Characters who could easily have been caricatures are shaded with complicating and contradictory textures. Hope (Olivia Colman), Augie’s stone-faced mother, repeatedly affirms her subservience to her husband (Jim Gaffigan), undercutting her image as an intimidating, matriarchal presence. In her icy condemnation of her younger, freer days as living in sin among “a bunch of dumb sheep just wandering in the dark,” there’s a note of genuine fear of the outside world, suggesting that her hardness is a defense mechanism as much as a display of her religious zealotry.

Unfortunately, the care with which the filmmakers set up Them That Follow’s context and their characters crumbles in the final act, in which the simmering tension between Mara’s secrets and the community’s internal hostility boils over in extreme displays of violence. The film’s initial subtle despair about life in this region gives way to garish scenes of lingered-upon brutality that reductively confront the story’s themes in simplistic, generic terms. Early on, Poulton and Savage’s explorations of the contours of their characters’ relationships to each other and the outside world sidestepped any kneejerk assessments about a community’s fanaticism. In the end, however, Them That Follow scuttles its delicate observational drama for a tidy, if grisly, conclusion that cheapens its deeper character and social insights.