If (2024)

*/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Steve Carell
written and directed by John Krasinski

by Walter Chaw The message of John Krasinski’s excruciating If is that you are never too old to have an imaginary friend–or, rather, you will never be so old that you won’t need an imaginary friend. Let’s all just sit with that for a minute. Work it around in your head. You will never…be so old…that you won’t need…an imaginary friend. Is that a warning? A promise of mental decline? Is the innocence and happiness of childhood synonymous with having an imaginary friend? The presumption is that imaginary friends are good things and that everyone has had one, you see, and one of the tragedies of growing up is that you forget your imaginary friend. Except there’s this adorable little Asian kid (Alan Kim, already needing a new agent) who doesn’t seem to have one for some reason, so I’m already starting to lose the thread that’s connecting this world. Do all kids have imaginary friends except Asian kids? Why is that? Is it a cultural ban? A deficiency? The fuck is going on? Another premise in If is that once kids forget about their imaginary friends, they disappear–except they don’t disappear, they’re still there but invisible to their former childhood pals. Bea (Cailey Fleming, who is great; this is not her fault) can see them, though. Bea is afraid she’s about to be orphaned. Bea is possibly a monster. Maybe there aren’t rules in If. Maybe it’s madness or hallucination, a psychedelic freakout or, better yet, a true sequel to the “It’s a Good Life” episode of “The Twilight Zone”, which I know did have a sequel, but here’s another one. Work with me here.

See, 45 minutes into If, there’s a tremendous sequence set to Tina Turner’s “Better Be Good To Me” where an insufferably twee young girl is encouraged to unleash her imagination on imaginary clown Cal (Ryan Reynolds, typecast) and obliges by creating a nightmare-scape of sentient vines, timeshifts, fucked-up Busby Berkeley numbers performed by ’30s-era pop-eyed animated bugs, and an undead Tina Turner resurrected to entertain an audience packed with a hideous menagerie of grotesque things. Is this her Hell? Is it like what Catholics do to Christ? Bring Him back from the dead weekly like Prometheus chained in the Caucasus to eat of His flesh and drink His blood because we love you so much we’ll EAT YOU UP? Bea climbs on stage mid-performance–Bea, the necromancer, the architect of this abomination parade. She puts on a top hat and dances maniacally, her lanky preteen arms pinwheeling like an old-timey wooden toy clipped together with rivets and shiny brass round-head fasteners: jointless, insane. Krasinski, because he’s such a dire director and so completely out of control of this picture at all times, shoots what I think is meant to be a fun romp for kids like a fucking panic attack. A rimshot cutaway to a middle-class, middle-aged anthropomorphic cat watching it all from a sad living room on an old CRT television is just the icing on the Hellmouth cake. Is he God, this cat? The Devil?

This 180 seconds of If is supremely upsetting. It feels like a fever dream, or a stroke, and it’s paced with the manic intensity of House of 1000 Corpses. But consider that the literal creator of it in the story of the film, this traumatized girl, is also a participant in it, and remember that its purpose is to terrify and bully her imaginary friend. I’ve only seen a few hundred horror movies that start this way, but I don’t know that I’ve seen any that had the budget Krasinski managed to conjure up following the breakout success of his also poorly thought-out, barely disguised conservative apocalypse fantasy A Quiet Place and its first sequel. Krasinski with a blank check is like a chimp with a howitzer. Witness the glorious destruction, the mad devastation, the uncanny Lovecraftian madness of it! Careful, now, don’t look directly at it. Are the imaginary monsters physical? Can they move objects in reality? Someone in the real world falls over one as the punchline to a running gag, but wait: what are the implications of these huge, invisible, corporeal beasts infesting our world? Through all the gyrations of the “Better Be Good to Me” (is that a threat?) sequence, the shambling shade of Tina Turner howls, stuck in her torment like the porcelain ballerina in the music-box version of the Lemarchand Configuration. Cal is now miserable, now frightened, and the monsters are smiling and showing too many teeth. It’s like a scene snipped from Clive Barker’s “Sex, Death and Starshine” in which a sold-out performance of “Twelfth Night” is performed to a house of rotting corpses. In these three minutes, If, through no fault of its own, is stunning.

“Prisoner of love, entangled in your web,” indeed. Someone exorcise Turner, for mercy’s sake; she’s earned the right not to be a plot point in John Krasinski’s motherfucking Drop Dead Fred. Two moments later in the film recapture the frantic fuckery of the abovementioned set-piece. One is when Bea surreptitiously spins a vinyl of Khachaturian’s “Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia,” thus causing her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) to mechanically ballet like the clockwork creature from Tales of Hoffmann. (This is the sort of movie where if an old woman sighs, “No one wants to see an old woman dance,” bet your bottom dollar we are about to). The other is a quick gag involving a marshmallow critter in a constant state of melting because he’s burning alive. The little fella loses an eye, wetly, while he’s talking. Cal gags with revulsion and horror. Bea giggles. She is the gamine adolescent Rakshasa in charge of this netherworld, and her delights are terrifying. On the one hand, If is a Jungian’s graduate thesis about what’s going on inside the head of someone with essentially no empathy when asked to manifest what they think other people are imagining. On the other hand, the “Better Be Good to Me” sequence, removed from the prefrontal lobe of a movie that nurses it like a deeply-rooted, tentacled, metastasized tumour, is one of the best films of the year.

The rest of it is a shrine to Garry Marshall sentiment that communicates somehow the tactile feeling of treacle and mucus–the yellow kind, when you’re really sick. You don’t watch If, you wade through it like a National Guardsman being hunted by Cajuns in the bayou. You’ll lose your boots: If will suck them off your feet with a pregnant “SCHooooooRK” noise. You’ll get trenchfoot, and diabetes, and you’ll be grateful for the sweet release of viscous, watery death. Every inch of this film is carpeted with a saccharine Michael Giacchino score that functions as emotional exposition. It’s the hallmark of a director who doesn’t trust his actors and doesn’t respect his audience. Considering the movie revolves around a girl who’s recently lost her mother and may lose her father (Krasinski himself) to a serious albeit never-named surgery, it’s obvious that anyone in her position would be anxious, sad, and afraid. It’s so obvious, in fact, that it’s emotionally pornographic, like if human suffering could get a pap smear. The thought that any sentient being would need any kind of help to understand very basic human emotions, much less the lavish, laborious, detailed help offered by this sloppy blowjob of a movie, is alien to the point of sociopathic. Yet here he is, John Krasinski, constantly nudging you that this script a privileged 12-year-old trying to conjure what it would be like to experience loss might write is poignant and wise. And who better to sell sincerity than Reynolds, who has fashioned an iconic persona around his insincerity? Fret not: For sincerity, Krasinski has lifted his dying-dad performance from Roberto Benigni’s in Life is Beautiful. Hey, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best, amiright? Oh shit, I forgot to mention what If is about. I’m just kidding, no I didn’t.