Nostalgia + killer clown = one of the best Stephen King adaptations to date.

Stephen King adaptations are a curious thing. When they work, they work. When they don’t, things can get ugly. While King’s name alone is generally enough to ensure respectable box office returns, critical opinion isn’t always so kind. For every Carrie or The Shining, there’s a Cell or The Mangler waiting around the corner, ready to undercut all the good work. Spanning decades and a variety of mediums, the sheer weight of King adaptations is eyewatering and, as is inevitable with such volume, you must hack through an awful lot of chaff to get to the wheat.

An oddity amidst a sea of oddities; It stands apart as a King adaptation with a cultural cachet that outweighs its ultimate quality. Adapted as a two-part TV miniseries, It found its place on the pop culture landscape thanks largely to a career defining performance from Tim Currie. Singlehandedly elevating the rather muddled material, Currie’s iconic turn as Pennywise the Clown would earn him a place in the hearts and nightmares of an entire generation.

Considering the mark (or, more accurately, scar) the character left on the pop culture landscape, as well as the continued interest in Stephen King adaptations; it’s quite remarkable that it’s taken this long for Pennywise to come stalking again. With that ominous twenty-seven-year mark now upon us, however, this seems like the perfect time for everyone’s favourite mass-murdering circus performer to re-emerge from the shadows.

It’s 1989 and, following a string of child disappearances in the small town of Derry, Maine; a group of teenagers, dubbed The Losers Club, are forced to confront their biggest fears to investigate the malevolent entity they believe to be behind it all. United by their horrific encounters with the demonic clown, Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), the seven members of The Losers Club make it their mission to take him down, putting an end to the cycle of murder and violence that has haunted Derry for centuries.

Much like Pennywise himself, It has an unsettling handle of its audience’s fears. Working, massaging, and manipulating these fears with impeccable precision, It’s greatest weapon is our predisposed distrust in clowns…and Stephen King knows this. Despite (or even because of) their relentlessly cheery disposition, there is something deeply primal about the fear that clowns invoke; an intrinsic anxiety that works across cultural and generational divides, and precisely the kind of fear that King has made a killing (pun very much intended) in exploiting.

On the back of this, and hot on the heels of a pitch perfect marketing campaign, many will go into It with expectations high for an all-out horror ride; yet, while the film certainly has its moments, there’s far more to it than that. With as much in common with Stand by Me as any full-blooded horror outing, It is more than happy to approach the genre from its own, unique, angle in order to build on its admirable emphasis of character first, scares second. The time and dedication taken to develop the individual members of The Losers Club, and their relationships with one another, are key to the film’s success and it’s in these factors that the filmmakers are able to add tangible depth to what could’ve easily been an exercise in paint-by-numbers horror.

Stephen King knows how to shock, and he’s made a very, very tidy living from it, but what often flies under the radar, is the leg-work the author puts into character development. Sure, he pulls no punches when the need to scare arises, yet it’s the care and attention he affords his characters that make those moments of horror hit their mark so effectively.

Clocking in at a doorstop-worthy 1,138 pages, the novel of It provides possibly the best example of this, with an incredible dedication to each of the book’s protagonists, and a commitment to making each one as fully-rounded as possible. While director Andy Muschietti eschews much of the novel’s heavier baggage, he does a superb job in retaining the heart and the character that made the book tick.

For all its jump-scares, the film’s dedication to its young characters is precisely where It really sticks its landing as a piece of satisfying entertainment. Engaging, colourful, and relatable; every member of the Losers Club are depicted with a warmth and affection that make them far more than one-dimensional clown fodder and, despite the cast’s relative lack of star-power, the youthful ensemble ooze charm, cohesiveness, and a carefree innocence that moulds with the material perfectly.

The cast is impeccable at every turn but, while Midnight Run’s Jaeden Lieberher and Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things will be the most recognisable faces, the film’s real star is relative unknown, Sophia Lillis. As Bev - the only female among a group of adolescent boys - her role is a potentially treacherous one; yet, despite the character being given less agency than her novel counterpart, Lillis delivers an astonishingly poised and mature performance that ensures the character never goes missing. Dealing with some of the film’s darkest material, Bev’s fearlessness exudes a maturity that’s otherwise absent from the group, as she’s able to avoid any damsel in distress pratfalls to become the glue that holds the Losers Club together.

It might sound odd but, in much the same way Jaws isn’t really a film about a shark, It isn’t really a film about clowns at all. Like any horror worth its salt, It manages to use its central monster as a metaphor and a platform to explore a number of deeper themes. To this, Andy Muschietti skilfully delves into matters of loneliness, loss, innocence, and exclusion; using each subject as a wonderfully weighted counterbalance to the film’s numerous jump-scares, but what the director aim to dive into deeper than anything else is the inherent notion of fear itself.

Pennywise is a creature fuelled by his victim’s deepest fears, peeling back the childhood innocence of each young character to expose the darkness within. Whether deeply complex like Bev’s abusive father and impending sexuality or relatively simple like the terrifying painting that haunts Stan; each deep-seated fear manifests itself as a potent physical symbol that, while not particularly subtle, work as an extremely effective source of horror.

Each moment of personal torture appears tailor-made for the victim but, dig a little deeper, and the real fear linking them all rears its ugly head. Adolescence is the real horror at play here; with the looming threat of adulthood presented as a being every inch as monstrous as Pennywise himself. Populated with abusers, manipulators, and emotional absentees, the adult world surrounding the Losers feels utterly horrific and one that Pennywise becomes the ultimate symbol of.

While the film manages to grasp far more of a handle on the book’s many complexities than the miniseries ever could, Andy Muschietti ensures that It’s darker moments don’t distract from the fun. Knowing precisely when to use levity to the film’s advantage, It owes a huge debt to comedy adventurers like The Goonies and, like the 80s cult classic, the jocular camaraderie between the movie’s young characters plays as a wonderful counterweight to the darkness.

This balancing act is a tough one to pull off, however, and there are certainly moments when It struggles to juggle its two contrasting sides, with the jokey tone often crashing a little too awkwardly into the horror to feel completely satisfying. This leads to a slightly off-kilter pacing, particularly during the first act, but as the film’s confidence grows, a natural balance is eventually found.

Riding high on the current wave of 80s Hollywood nostalgia, It revels in its period setting, as Muschietti goes to great lengths to ensure our trip back to the decade feels natural. It is the entire 80s output of Amblin Entertainment rolled into one and leaves no lingering doubts that, like the thematically similar Netflix hit Stranger Things; we’ll be wading, neck-deep in nostalgia here.

With every sign for Lethal Weapon 2 or Batman playing at Derry’s one movie theatre, and with every Street Fighter machine lurking in the local arcade, there comes a little knowing wink and a nudge at the audience that borders on often borders on distracting. While it’s all rather thickly applied, however, it largely avoids becoming a pure nostalgia piece due to the heart put into the execution. Quite frankly, when this much care and attention has gone into ticking that warm, fuzzy nostalgia button in your brain, why fight it?

Let’s face it though. For all its nostalgia, character, and heart; any adaptation of It lives or dies on its Pennywise. Tim Curry’s once-in-a-lifetime performance is a tough act for anyone to follow, especially for a relative newcomer, but Bill Skarsgård takes the challenge in his stride and makes the role his own. His approach to the character is a world away from Tim Curry’s zany, cartoonish energy but it works, as Skarsgård’s reinterpretation bristles with a physicality and a visceral intensity that offers something pleasantly different. In action, the character’s blend of practical makeup and CGI come together perfectly to transform Skarsgård into a truly monstrous creation, teeming with off-kilter menace and physically intensity that allows the character to dictate the action without becoming overbearing.

As one would expect, the majority of It’s scares come directly via Pennywise and he is without doubt one of the film’s greatest strengths. Muschietti knows the power of his monster and knows exactly how to deploy him but, while many will approach It expecting Pennywise to provide non-stop scares, focusing purely on this ignores the film’s finer points completely. Although a film centred on a demonic, child-murdering clown could never be anything other than downright terrifying; there’s another side to It that works well to counterbalance the jump-scares with something with far more depth.

At the film’s heart, It is a coming-of-age adventure with as much in common with The Goonies as it does with A Nightmare on Elm Street; blending adventure, comedy, drama, and horror into a pleasantly satisfying throwback to an era that Amblin built. Treating his young characters with warmth and affection, Andy Muschietti builds the film’s emotions from the ground up; ensuring that every member of the Losers Club appears well-rounded and relatable, while finding them an adversary every bit as terrifying as Tim Curry’s original Pennywise. By putting a little too much currency in cheap jump-scares and thickly layered nostalgia, It holds itself back from greatness but that doesn’t stop this from becoming one of the best Stephen King adaptations to date.