Add Category
Posted
A clown in a stormwater drain talks to a young boy who has come looking for his paper boat.
The emblematic image of the 1990 TV miniseries IT, inspired by the 1986 Stephen King novel of the same name, is an absurd composite of the everyday and the sinister that's inspired a thousand memes.
The moment itself, a grotesque stranger danger vignette that quickly transforms from innocuous to horrific, is a stand in for what the story goes on to explore.
A group of children in the small Maine town of Derry are haunted by the malevolent shapeshifting entity Pennywise, the dancing clown, who symbolises the deep, pervasive evil beneath the surface of middle America.
This week, a slick remake by Argentine horror director Andres Muschietti (Mama) breathes fresh life into the sewer demon, otherwise known to the kids as It.
The partial adaptation focuses only on his victims in childhood, rather than following them into adulthood as in the original, and transposes the 1960s setting into the late 1980s.
It's not hugely dissimilar to Netflix's Stranger Things, and a star of that series, the gangly Finn Wolfhard, appears here.
The imprint of Korean cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung (Oldboy, Stoker) pervades the film. It sweeps you away with sheer visual elegance, seamlessly segueing from one carefully-crafted camera move to the next.
But this stylistic gloss often comes at the expense of the original's uneven, often gritty charm, not to mention its more upfront satire. Gone is Tim Curry's camp performance of Pennywise, who has been transformed by Bill Skarsgard into something more unambiguously threatening.
And the fluid camerawork might be well-suited to establishing mood, but Muschietti is less capable with the heavy lifting of horror jolts and scares.
Reports of a troubled pre-production period proliferated after the departure of the director's predecessor on the film, True Detective's Cary Fukunaga, two years ago. It might be one of the reasons It seems to struggle to pull it all together.
Photo:
The film's socially awkward protagonists call themselves The Losers. (Supplied: Warner Bros.)
Muschietti handles the group tensions between the six boys and one girl, who call themselves The Losers, by drawing out some vivid, individual quirks, but the film doesn't reach the emotional pathos of precedents like Stand By Me, another King adaptation.
Pennywise of course is more than a vague bogeyman — he's a pointer towards real-world evils that involve the characters directly.
A chilling subplot of child abuse, relevant to the girl in particular, is a confronting reminder of the grim reality behind the fantasy, and a bathroom covered in blood that only the children see is a particularly well-handled plot device that establishes the idea of a collective waking nightmare.
But the theme of the town's history of racial conflict seems underdeveloped, as if the film is too busy establishing a Goonies-style adventure.
While Fukunaga wasn't necessarily a better choice for director, you wonder what the film might have been if it managed to lasso its various traumatic subplots into an overarching, True Detective-style statement about America's murky side.
Muschietti's film — for all its sophisticated craft and sugary thrills — falls just short of embedding its likeable characters into the subtext of American corruption and injustice.
Pennywise remains a chilling figure, lurking beneath the streets of a small Maine town, but you feel his most poignant appearances are still to come.
Maybe some of those will be in the planned sequel — or perhaps in meme form.
Topics: horror-films, film, arts-and-entertainment, united-states