Menace is a difficult attribute to get right in a film. Danger is an elusive thing. It goes beyond looking or acting a little “off.” There should be a real threat of physical and emotional violence, but at the same time it’s hard to portray those things on the big screen without going overboard. If just anyone could find the proper level of restraint, every horror film would be a masterpiece.
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| Photo credit: It Movie/Facebook |
Going overboard is the path IT finds itself following, haplessly. The 1989-set update on Stephen King’s novel about a supernatural entity that dresses like a clown named Pennywise so it can eat children is allergic to the kind of restraint that would actually scare someone.
Directed by Andy Muschietti (Mama), the movie is all too eager to show that it has the goods in the splatter department, to the detriment of suspense and lingering fear. It leans into its R-rating with the recklessness of a high school senior on their first college visit. Except here, the realization of, ”You mean I can take 10 shots?” is translated to, “You mean I can start my movie by showing a screaming little kid’s arm chomped off by a clown with more teeth than a great white shark?”
It’s not that this is in poor taste—horror films should shock you. But this and several other decisions reveal the filmmakers’ lack of trust in the audience’s imagination, creating a backfire effect that dulls the shock. It’s like oversharing, being just a little too clear about what’s happening in moments of fear. It leaves the truly anxiety-inducing ambiguity from being able to take hold in a viewer’s mind, which would prompt the viewer to project their worst fears onto the movie in a way that would frighten them in far more profound ways.
This demystification act follows time and again throughout the movie, which never fails to show you too much, to go too far, and paint with the broadest brush possible. Everything has to be pedal to the metal 100 percent of the time, pacing and dramatic escalation be damned.
This applies just as much to the human threats to the film’s adolescent heroes as it does to the supernatural elements. It’s there when uptight poindexter Eddie’s (Jack Dylan Grazer) hypochondriac mom plants seed after seed in his mind that he is sickly and on the verge of death unless he stuffs his face with an arsenal of pills. There it is when a local, mulleted bully carves his initials into Ben’s (Jeremy Ray Taylor) chubby belly—this maniacal behavior blunts later “twists” involving the mullet kid. It’s most egregious in the relationship Beverly (Sophia Lillis) has with her abusive single father (Stephen Bogaert), who is such a caricature of abusive traits that he may as well be credited as Child Molester No. 1. There is no nuance, nothing to suggest subjectivity, only scorched-earth storytelling that says, “Everything in the world is terrible except these kids who are themselves on the verge of becoming bad because adulthood is just over the horizon.”
It’s not just Muschietti’s directorial choices, either, that do the movie in. Much of the failure falls on the shoulders of editor Jason Ballantine. He lingers for far too long on the various forms Pennywise takes, which are designed with limited imagination. Whether it’s a paint-by-numbers zombie or a painting of a woman with a distorted face, Ballantine leaves them on the screen just long enough to ruin the fear value of a simple jump scare—and jump scares are cheap as it is. It’s a painfully un-scary mess.
If IT has a saving grace, it’s in the scenes of kids hanging out in the summertime. The cast of mostly boys in their early teens nails the self-conscious (and clueless) sex talk, the overeagerness to swear when away from parents (embodied by Finn Wolfhard of Netflix’s Stranger Things), and the endless gawking at the opposite sex that accompany the middle school years. Mostly, though, the movie understands what it’s like to not fit in—there’s a running gag that involves listening to an “uncool” kind of music that is so warm and lovely and honest that it raises this review’s rating by a half star.
If Muschietti and screenwriters Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga (who was originally slated to direct and left the project, unfortunately), and Gary Dauberman had put these hangout scenes front and center and backgrounded the horror, IT could have been a special coming-of-age story with supernatural trappings. But that would require restraint.
And, as we know, restraint is tough to come by in IT.
Director: Andy Muschietti
Writers: Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, Gary Dauberman
Starring: Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher, Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, Wyatt Oleff, Jackson Robert Scott
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
Available in theaters now
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