Them That Follow (2019)

Them That Follow is the kind of thriller that gets under your skin not with cheap shocks, but with a slow, suffocating sense of faith turned into pressure, ritual, and risk. Set inside a snake-handling Pentecostal community, it feels unnervingly authentic—like you’ve stepped into a world with its own rules and consequences—and the filmmaking lets the atmosphere do as much damage as any confrontation. The ensemble is uniformly committed, giving the story a lived-in intensity where every glance and silence carries weight, especially as a young woman’s buried past threatens to crack the congregation’s certainty. If you like your thrillers tense, intimate, and morally thorny rather than action-driven, this one grips hard and doesn’t let go.

Them That Follow is clearly aiming for a tense, faith-vs-desire pressure cooker set inside an isolated Pentecostal snake-handling community, and the premise has real built-in dread. The problem is the script often plays like a dry rehearsal of a thriller: beats feel predictable, character choices can come off frustratingly illogical, and there’s little relief or texture to keep the drama from feeling inert. If you’re expecting sharp twists, moral complexity, or even a touch of dark humor, this may test your patience, and some viewers also question how authentically it portrays the subculture it’s depicting. Still, if you’re drawn to austere rural atmospheres and slow-burn tension anchored in taboo and repression, there’s enough mood here to justify a watch.