Bea’s dad encourages her to make the most of her time in New York, to make an adventure of it. As a realist, she bristles at his incessant attempts to keep her spirits up, just as she bristles at grandma’s attempts to treat her like a little kid, but she still follows his advice. The optics of it aren’t great: she sees an adult man (Ryan Reynolds, highly effective in a more downbeat role than usual) breaking into a child’s first-floor bedroom, and rather than calling the police she starts going on long walks with him around the city. Fortunately for her, and the film, Cal isn’t a predator, he’s sort of a social worker for childless imaginary friends. She becomes his assistant.
That writer-director Krasinski followed up A Quiet Place and its sequel with this children’s film might baffle anyone who has seen its trailer, which makes it look like a goofball close cousin to Adam Sandler’s Bedtime Stories, and doesn’t really convey the film’s tone – or quality – well at all. To anyone who has watched the film, the throughline is obvious. Like Krasinski’s previous films, IF is deeply emotional, and humanistic, rooted in character, a story of people looking for a way to carry on living after the worst has happened. The family in A Quiet Place are lonely, starved of human connection, and that’s what IF is all about. What happens to imaginary friends when they lose their kids? What happens to a family without mum? What happens to the elderly, the unloved, the lost?
In the real world an imaginary friend might not help much with loneliness – unless of course lots of other people have the same imaginary friend and you meet regularly in draughty buildings to talk about him. But there’s nothing wrong with a film pointing to a real problem and offering a fantastical solution. It still gets us thinking about the problem. I realise that I’m making it sound po-faced and sad, but when this film got me to shed a tear (and it did, I admit) it was out of sheer happiness. It’s literally heart-warming, as Bea and Cal work out how to re-ignite the hearts of IFs and the adults who have forgotten them.
The performances are uniformly excellent. Fleming portrays a character with the same intensity, determination and intelligence as Judith in The Walking Dead, but she gets to have a bit of fun here too, and she’s more convincing in her interactions with computer-generated characters than many adult actors ever manage. It’s fun trying to recognise the voice actors (Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Sam Rockwell are particularly good), and those CGI characters are some of the best-realised I’ve ever seen, integrated so perfectly with the live action that we never doubt their existence. I would love to see Krasinski and his effects team apply these skills to spaceships and aliens.
It’s very funny too, but is it as good as Drop Dead Fred? That’s an unfair question, because that’s one of my favourite films of all time. But IF is definitely better than Imaginary, the year’s previous film about children grieving their mother with the help of an imaginary friend. Imaginary wasn't terrible, but it was deeply derivative of Insidious and its sequels, whereas IF is its own film. You could perform the whole thing with actors on a stage and it would be just as moving. It was a shame to be watching it in a near-empty cinema, though not a surprise – I only watched it because my wife thought it would be good, and as usual she was right. I think it will find fans as soon as it hits a streaming service. And I bet the kids especially will watch it more than once to spot all the subtle clues they missed the first time around. Stephen Theaker ****
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