I’m happy to report out what the rest of the world has already been telling you: It is fantastic.
If the 2017 theatrical remake of It didn’t have a single competent scare in it, it would still be worth a look. The heart of the film lies in the “loser’s club” of young teens who join forces to fight back against bullies and supernatural murder clowns, alike. The casting and direction of child actors is always a tricky proposition, but the team behind this film does a masterful job in both regards. Forget their age, this is one of the best ensemble casts in horror history. There’s some movie shorthand deployed in building these relationships, and some overly simplified anxieties for the antagonist to exploit, but the performances really ground everything and make you believe that these are real people. Finn Wolfhard’s Richie, in particular, is immediately recognizable as the insecure kid who overcompensates with constant bravado, and everybody knew that guy growing up. Jeremy Ray Taylor as Ben and Sophia Lillis as Bev also put in incredibly endearing performances, but really there are no weak links. The film does a good job isolating these children from the adults in their lives so that they have only each other to turn to when terrible things start to happen. That helps cover the plot from a plausibility perspective, but thematically it echoes how everything is dramatic and potentially horrifying to a thirteen-year-old, even the stuff that adults have no time or interest to understand.
Our investment in these characters really helps sell the horror elements. And don’t worry, there is definitely more than a single competent scare. From the very start of the film, Pennywise is front and center, and he remains a constant presence through the many hallucinatory encounters he has with the children. In fact, the horror set pieces are way more frequent than I was expecting from this. I will say that while I was enjoying myself, I still didn’t find it particularly scary through the first half of the film. Then, around the mid-point, there is an amazing scene where director Andres Muschietti mimics the slow strobe-like lighting of a slide reel that instills a palpable sense of dread. From that point to the end of the film, the horror is elevated. It could be argued that Muschietti is derivative, and he does certainly leverage a grab bag of styles to produce scares (there are James Wan-style jump scares, subtle background creepiness a la It Follows, even Alien-esque telescoping mandibles.) I actually appreciate the shotgun approach to styles, however, because it works as a neat meta element to the film. The story is about a monster that caters nightmare imagery to his victims in order to induce fear, so it makes sense that the filmmaker would cycle through horror’s greatest hits to do the same thing to his audience.
Of course the most important element that the film has to nail is the titular “It” itself, also known as Pennywise the dancing clown. I think that Tim Curry is a cinematic treasure, but there’s no way his Joker-like performance in the 1990 mini-series would have fit in this film. Still, the template he laid down absolutely informs his successor. Bill Skarsgard does an excellent job playing the eldritch terror as an intense, slavering glutton who is over-eager to stuff his belly with the flesh, and fear, of the town’s children. He does some fine physical acting and displays enough nuance beyond “menacing terror” that you can believe that the club has a chance to out-maneuver him. Refreshingly, everyone involved resists the urge to make him cool like many of the horror icons of my youth – even the bad kids he kills are treated with sympathy, and there are no one-liners being flung about with glee. It’s clear who the audience is supposed to root for and how to feel about Pennywise’s merciless war of psychological torment.
I can’t encourage you enough to see this movie. Maybe you won’t like it as much as me, especially if you are more familiar than I am with the original novel or have more than a passing recollection of the old miniseries. If you know nothing about the storyline, then my recommendation is even stronger. It’s rare to see a horror movie simultaneously have such a complex mythology and yet hold up to its own internal logic. If I didn’t know the broad strokes of the story already, I can imagine my enjoyment to be even more outsized. Either way, it’s practically a mandate in order to keep up with the national pop culture conversation at this point, so if you were on the fence, let this review be the nudge that you needed.
Comments