The dour, yet pacy and surprisingly graphic take on Stephen King’s novel IT was a pleasant surprise when it hit our cinema screens a couple of years ago, and the promise of a second, and closing chapter has been something which fans of the film have kept an eye on ever since. Picking up, as per the novel, twenty-seven years after the Losers Club swore they would return to Derry, Maine if ‘It’ ever resurfaced, It Chapter Two delivers a great deal of similar, artful scares to the first instalment. It does a few things quite differently too, however, with a few knowing nods to other genre directors, not least to my mind Sam Raimi, as ‘It’s’ escapades here often veer towards the comedic, as well as the inventive and nasty.
All variously going about their lives away from Maine, the now forty-ish year old group of friends have all largely lost touch with one another, just as typically happens as we grow older and move on. As we see, their adult lives are not particularly happy, but they have by and large gone through the motions of a normal existence – kids, career, partner. All present and correct. What is more strange is that, with one exception, they have all seemingly forgotten about the strange events which united them as children. It’s only Mike (Isaiah Mustafa), who never moved away from Derry and in fact lives in the same house he did as a kid, who recalls Pennywise, and the promise that they would reunite if Pennywise ever came back. He makes a series of phone-calls; Derry is being gripped by violence and disappearances once more, with a man washing up partially dismembered after being thrown into the river one night (making the slightly clumsy point here that, whatever Pennywise is, Derry locals can match, in terms of violence at least).
All at first disbelieving and hesitant, the Losers Club (with one exception) all acquiesce to Mike’s increasingly desperate demands. So, Beverly (Jessica Chastain), Bill (James McAvoy), the still-wisecracking Richie (Bill Hader), Eddie (James Ransone) and the now hot Ben (Jay Ryan) return to town, meeting up in a scene which genuinely conveys a sense of old friends being reunited – this is a brilliantly-cast film, and not just because every actor so plausibly could be the younger cast grown up because of their strong physical resemblances. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Pennywise knows they’re around, and has been waiting for them.
To a large extent, the rest of the film follows the same path as the first chapter. I mean, how could it not? It’s simply that here we have adults with their own baggage, striving to remember the teenagers they were, whilst also contending with the supernatural threat which assailed them back then. To make the comparison, this film opts to use a lot of flashbacks to the first chapter, both reiterating key scenes and filling in certain gaps by adding other sequences which affected the group twenty seven years previously. Some of these are very effective – perhaps there is just something more compelling about a supernatural being who has adapted its appearance to lure children, and therefore is of the biggest threat to them. There is some imaginative work going on here. However, the number and length of the flashbacks to scenes already used in It: Chapter One (made more obvious as we saw both films as a double bill) were a little excessive in places: I think the audience could have been trusted to recall far more of a film which is ultimately only two years old. It Chapter Two runs very long at 170 minutes, and there’s always a risk here of a film overstaying its welcome.
The choice to use what were, to my mind, more obviously cartoonish horror sequences – which put me straight in mind of Evil Dead 2, right down to the appearance of the creatures themselves – is an interesting one, and overall these fit in with the more evident threat scenes, though this mixed tone does seem to be the point at which the second chapter deviates most strongly from the first. There’s certainly no lack of sequences where It manifests, though: following the novel fairly closely, even if opting out of some of the manifestations as written by King, It takes various forms throughout before the ‘big finale’ (though one which, unlike the novel, did seem a little convenient and straightforward, given the havoc being caused by this being.) But hey, throughout, the script riffs on Bill’s career as a horror writer and how people ‘don’t like the ending’ on various of his books. As with the film’s decision to refer openly to other horror and sci-fi films (something I didn’t particularly like, and which took me out of the film at hand temporarily) perhaps we’re being invited to consider our own preferences for how stories end here, too.
There are a few minor gripes then, but all in, It Chapter Two is a fun film and a worthy conclusion to a creative spin on the King novel. It has certainly helped cement Pennywise for a generation of people who never saw, and were therefore not traumatised by the TV miniseries, and it has an abundance of good qualities, not least great performances and an awareness of how to explore some very primal fears on screen.