IF (2024) Review

When 12-year-old Bea (Cailey Fleming) visits her grandma (Fiona Shaw), she (Bea) warns her she is not a little kid anymore. Bea ignores her colour pencils and craft books of the time when doodled away her sadness in childish drawings while her mother slowly succumbed to cancer. This time, she wants to do the grown-up thing and steel herself for father's heart surgery, even as he clowns around his hospital room, dancing a ditty with his IV-line to lighten the mood.

But Bea sees a fantastical vision: a cartoon humanoid butterfly who keeps popping up in places and is visible only to her. Bea follows Blossom into an apartment above her grandmother's where she meets a cynical ex-clown named Calvin (Ryan Reynolds) who turns out to be a reluctant caretaker for Blossom and a giant purple Furby named Blue (Steve Carrell). Bea learns that Blossom and Blue are Imaginary Friends or IFs - companions made up by creative little kids who have since aged out of them. Bea discovers a whole community of IFs out there waiting to be remembered by their kids, or matched up to new ones.

IF is in many ways, a full realisation of actor-director John Krasinski's post-Covid public persona as a spreader of cheer. He played Covid-Santa Claus on 'Some Good News', his jolly podcast where he only spoke of happy things, eager to display his sunny side. Perhaps he feared that the only monsters we would remember him by are the hideous, man-eating kind that he brought to life in his superhit dark, dystopian series The Quiet Place. IF's "monsters" are cuddly, cute, vivid expressions of childhood creativity. A parade of recognisable characters that decorate the refrigerators of homes around the world: unicorns, dragons, bright sunflowers with smiley faces. And from more precocious minds, animated floating bubbles, or glasses of ice water with legs, or altogether invisible ones. But no longer needed by their kids, these IFs spend the rest of their days at a "retirement home" tearfully reminiscing their glory days. Bea decides to become a match-maker and find homes to place the IFs in.

Like a pile of a child's half-finished drawings, though, not all of Krasinski's sugary ideas take full shape. Unable to decide whether his family entertainer is for kids or for adults, Krasinki splits the difference and puts out a garbled message for both. Something about always holding on to one's inner child. Something about how a child processes a traumatic life event.

A culmination of his mixed messages is a scene where a sweaty, anxious adult man (played by Bobby Moynihan) remembers his childhood IF Blue, the memory of which bathes him in a golden light and calms him down before his big interview. What is Krasinski trying to tell us? Whatever it is, it sounds either patronising or simple-minded. Krasinski though vindicates himself as the ideal adult through his character of Bea's father, a man who is apparently so intune with his playful side that he smiles all the way into and out of the operation theatre.

Despite the certifiably delightful IF characters, voiced by A-list celebs from George Clooney to Bradley Cooper, and even with Ryan-freaking-Reynolds playing Calvin, the film is often bleak. Without meaning to, it becomes not a movie about recapturing the magic of childhood, but a depressing reminder that for adults, their best times may be behind them and the way to cope with the harshness of adulting is to sometimes literally behave like a child. Bea asks her grandma what she wanted to be when as a child and later that night finds her solo-dancing by the moonlit window - it is an oddly gloomy scene, seeped in nostalgia.

Perhaps ironically, one must ignore its try-hard ideas and platitude-filled dialogues to recognize its magical potential. The highlight of the film is a gleefully choreographed sequence in which Calvin stumbles through the IF retirement home as Bea's imagination repaints and rearranges it into a giant funhouse in which all the IFs come alive. The film needed at least ten more such energetic scenes. Instead, it gets mired in its philosophies which it tries to deliver all at once. There are also curiously long stretches of silence where nothing really happens, where the pacing is so slow and affected that only the twinkly background track reminds us that we are not in fact watching The Quiet Place.

Cailey Fleming does an admirable job considering that all she has to do is talk to imaginary creatures. Ryan Reynolds is underutilized as the grumpy Cal who doesn't say a single memorable line of dialogue in the entire film. The film, instead, belongs to Steve Carrell, the voice of Blue, who breathes such a distinct personality into big, fluffy, adorably clumsy furball Blue that this character begs a Disney spin-off of its own.

IF is neither a kid's movie, nor one for adults - instead, like its characters, it is trapped in some limbo state, an overthinking man-child of a movie that complicates much more than it communicates or delights.