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- Well-acted and fiendishly frightening with an emotionally affecting story at its core, It amplifies the horror in Stephen King's classic story without losing touch with its heart.
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Sep 8, 2017 · Tonally, “It” feels like a throwback to great King adaptations of yore—particularly “Stand By Me,” with its ragtag band of kids on a morbid adventure, affecting bravado and affectionately hassling each other to mask their true jitters.
Sep 8, 2017 · Well-acted and fiendishly frightening with an emotionally affecting story at its core, It amplifies the horror in Stephen King's classic story without losing touch with its heart. Read Critics...
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- The most Stephen King movie ever.
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By William Bibbiani
Updated: Sep 6, 2017 3:15 pm
Posted: Sep 6, 2017 6:00 am
There have been so many Stephen King adaptations over the last four decades - many of them bad - that it’s easy to take them for granted. But there is something undeniably appealing about the sensibilities of this prolific author, a visual quality that translates effectively to the screen, and it’s something that director Andy Muschietti captures disturbingly well in his adaptation of IT… or at least, in this first half of the two-part film.
Stephen King’s seminal work about a group of put-upon children who overcome their fears - personified as a demonic clown - and later revisit their childhood traumas as adults has been adapted once before, in a 1990 TV mini-series. And although that version features a haunting performance by Tim Curry as the titular monster, its workmanlike presentation doesn’t come close to this new adaptation, which understands that King’s small-town nostalgia is purposefully grandiose. Memories of childhood have a tendency to take on a larger-than-life quality, a perspective which Muschietti interprets on film with romantic sentimentality half the time and grotesquely distorted funhouse-mirror theatricality the rest.
IT tells the story of “The Losers’ Club,” seven children whose seemingly idyllic summer vacation in 1989 is marred by the inexplicable disappearance of young people throughout the small town of Derry, Maine. They’d rather not have to deal with the horror closing in around them - who would? - but they cannot escape the increasingly vivid visions of their greatest fears. Those fears are brought to life by the gleeful nightmare clown Pennywise, played with gruesome, wall-eyed anti-charm by Bill Skarsgård, who is at times seductive, and at times the appalling personification of every scary clown meme on the internet.
That’s because Muschietti has to lay the groundwork for a terrific and terrifying conclusion in which all of his characters are on the same, almost unbelievable page. When the time comes for the climax, the filmmakers up the ante, making Pennywise one of the most visually extreme horror villains on record. Skarsgård cavorts, contorts and - thanks to the ingenuity of the visual effects team - completely ignores the laws of physics to create a monster whose appearance is so unnatural it’s hard to believe your eyes. That’s why, for a long time, the members of The Losers Club don’t tell each other what they’ve seen, and why it’s all the more frightening when, surrounded by blood that only they can see, they no longer have the plausible deniability that maybe, just maybe, all of this trauma is a delusional manifestation of their deep-seated, but otherwise conventional psychological dread.
What makes IT, or at least this first half of IT (since the film adapts only the first half of Stephen King’s novel, with the latter half to come in a sequel), so beautifully, uncomfortably, and shockingly effective is that Muschietti gets right out in front of King’s story and tells the living hell out of it. Subtlety is the responsibility of the actors; the director is telling a scary story at a campfire, shining a flashlight under his face and taking advantage of everything he knows about his audience.
IT may not be the best Stephen King movie (even though it comes impressively close), but it’s probably the MOST Stephen King movie. Director Andy Muschietti evokes the horror author’s effortless melodrama and in-your-face psychological torments simultaneously, because he seems to understand that these sensibilities bring out the best and, by defini...
Review scoring
amazing
While IT may not be the best Stephen King movie, it comes impressively close.
William Bibbiani
- William Bibbiani
The most appealing parts of Andy Muschietti’s splashy It channel another classic Stephen King adaptation—but not the 1990 miniseries version of It, featuring an iconic Tim Curry performance ...
Sep 6, 2017 · The climactic sequence of “It” sacrifices horror-movie creepiness for action-movie bombast, staging a big fight in a cavernous space. We might as well be looking at superheroes.
- Andy Muschietti
- A.O. Scott
- 135 min
Sep 6, 2017 · Sep 6, 2017 11:56am PT. Stephen King’s ‘It’ Reviews: What the Critics Are Saying. By Erin Nyren. Warner Bros. Stephen King film and television adaptations have a long history of...
Sep 6, 2019 · Stephen King. Director Andy Muschietti has absolutely gone for it with the sequel to his 2017 smash Stephen King adaptation, taking big swings and displaying both a muscularity and an elegance to his craft.
