Directed by: Andy Muschietti
Starring: Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis, Nicholas Hamilton
Rated R, 135 minutes
Good horror is in the details. It’s one thing to startle the audience, to bring the soundtrack down to a dead silence before springing a ghost in the viewer’s face, but it’s another to rely on inference rather than surprise to get under the viewer’s skin. “The Shining” showed us pages and pages of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” for instance, while “Misery” depicted an earnest Annie Wilkes brandishing a sledgehammer. The new adaptation of “It,” however, pokes and prods at the viewer without ever truly getting under our skin. Like the red balloons floating throughout the film, it’s flashy without bearing much weight.
Thankfully, “It” is still an enjoyable movie, at least insofar as it earns its running time and mostly avoids the clichés of movies about children. Mostly this is thanks to the source material, which spares no one, no matter how young, from pain and suffering. After all, these kids are fighting off a shapeshifting demon that devours children. This isn’t some cutesy late-career Steven Spielberg flick with magic-hour lighting and gazes of astonishment plastered on everybody’s face; these kids curse and fight and kill. This is a movie that allows the horrific to be horrific, that allows the vulgar to be vulgar, and that makes no apologies for itself.
This is also a movie with a terrific villain. Bill Skarsgård (“Atomic Blonde”), as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, is to “It” what Heath Ledger was to “The Dark Knight,” a scene-stealing force of nature whose appearance in any scene is welcome because we want to see what awful things he will do next. Accentuated by perfectly macabre costumes and makeup design, this Pennywise is surely one of the best movie villains in recent memory.
Unfortunately, that leaves the rest of the movie, which suffers from an overstuffed plot and an overcrowded cast of characters. Not only does the movie exhaust itself trying to establish seven different characters as heroes, but it also struggles to incorporate bullies and abusive parents into the mix as secondary antagonists. The end result is a movie that has about a dozen stories running at the same time, but never lets any one of them grow into something deeper. And despite juggling all these stories (or maybe because of it), the movie never makes clear what the titular demon is or how Pennywise functions, assuming instead that the viewer either has already read the book or doesn’t care about the reason behind the terror.
That said, I don’t necessarily mind the empty scares. Skarsgård is a good enough monster to sell them, and the effects are good enough to help him. Director Andy Muschietti (“Mama”) might have no flair for handling scenes of real-life drama, but when the clown comes out, so does a sure-footed director with a keen eye for pacing and suspense.
And luckily, “It” has enough of these moments to carry the movie and make it an enjoyable moviegoing experience overall. Ultimately, however, it’s not enough to make the movie anything more than a decent way to spend a couple hours. True, many movies have done worse for themselves, but I can’t help but feel that “It” could have been a much more piercing work of horror had the scares been crafted with more attention to detail. Take, for example, the scene in the library, during which a librarian lurks in the background watching one of the kids. This is easily the most unnerving moment of the whole movie, but it’s the only such moment of subtle creepiness, leaving us to wonder why Muschietti didn’t go that route more often instead of relying so heavily on the cheap “Don’t go in there!” kind of terror.
Of course, not every Stephen King adaptation can be “The Shining” or “Misery,” and unlike those movies, “It” is further handicapped by having a villain that lacks any humanity. The irony, though, is that the idiosyncrasies that Skarsgård gives Pennywise in this adaptation make the demon of Derry, Maine, a more interesting character than any of the kids trying to stop him. “It” is either a waste of an excellent villain or a lackluster project saved by a remarkable performance, but either way, it doesn’t follow you out of the theater the way a horror movie should.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 10/6/17.