It

It is a very good film about children and a merely adequate film about a monster, and it made seven hundred million dollars on the strength of the first half of that sentence.

The Losers' Club is the achievement. Muschietti casts seven kids who talk over each other, swear constantly, insult each other with real affection and behave like a group rather than an ensemble, and then gives them an hour of screen time in which nothing supernatural happens. The quarry, the bikes, the pharmacy, the garage, the hammock argument: all of it is doing the structural work, because the film's actual subject is that every adult in Derry is either absent, negligent or predatory, and the children have nobody. Beverly's father, Eddie's mother, Mike's grandfather, Bill's parents after Georgie: the town is the horror and Pennywise is its symptom.

Sophia Lillis and Jaeden Martell carry it, and Finn Wolfhard's Richie is the reason the film is funny, which it needs to be.

Bill Skarsgård is doing something interesting and the film keeps overriding him

His Pennywise is genuinely unsettling when still — the misaligned eyes, the drool, the voice that slides up into a child's register, the stillness in the Neibolt hallway. Then the CGI arrives and the film turns him into a bounding, mouth-unhinging creature with a digital smear, which is a far less frightening proposition than a clown standing in a doorway holding a balloon. Every scare in the film works in inverse proportion to how much money was spent on it.

The storm drain is still the best thing in it

The opening is close to perfect: a paper boat, a rainstorm, a brother's voice coming out of a grate, a conversation that is almost tender, and then an arm. It is a two-hander between a six-year-old and a monster, played mostly in close-up, and it establishes the film's entire method before the title card.

Where it is weak

The scares are over-scored and over-cut, with almost every one of them given a bass drop. Mike is badly underwritten — the novel's historian is reduced to a boy with a bolt gun. The Bowers subplot is thin. And the film's structural choice to split the novel means the adult material, which is where King's book is strangest, is absent entirely.

For the same King material filmed in 1980, The Shining; for King's own version of a town that will not help, Pet Sematary; for the other great De Palma-era King adaptation, Carrie.

The short answer: Beverly is taken to It's lair under the Derry well and suspended in the air by the deadlights — conscious, catatonic and floating. The remaining six go down, are separated, and are told by Pennywise that it only wants Bill's group to leave. They refuse. Ben kisses Beverly and she wakes. The children then attack it physically and together, and It visibly weakens as they stop being afraid: Bill tells it that it will starve, Beverly drives a fence spike through its head, and it retreats down the shaft and is gone. The group swears a blood oath on Bill's hand to return to Derry if it comes back. The film ends on the words "Chapter One".

What is Pennywise in It?

An ancient non-human intelligence that has lived beneath Derry for longer than the town, wakes roughly every twenty-seven years to feed, and takes whatever shape most frightens its target. The clown is a lure chosen for children, not its real form. The film's one piece of cosmology is a cave painting Ben finds in a history book and the detail that it arrived rather than originated — enough to establish it is not a ghost and not a demon in the Christian sense.

How do the Losers beat It?

By not being afraid of it, together. The film is explicit that It feeds on fear and that fear makes its victims edible — the children it takes are seasoned by terror first. When the seven stand in the same place and refuse to be frightened, It loses its ability to hold shape and takes physical damage from ordinary objects: a bolt gun, a fence post, a baseball bat. The final blow is Bill telling it that it will starve.

What are the deadlights?

The orange lights in Pennywise's mouth and the state they induce. Looking into them removes consciousness while leaving the body alive: the victim floats, eyes open, not dead and not present, which is why the sewer chamber is full of drifting children. Beverly is in the deadlights for the entire final sequence and is woken by a kiss, which the film takes straight from the novel and plays without irony.

Why does It come back every 27 years?

The film states the cycle without explaining it: Mike's reading and Ben's research both establish a pattern of Derry catastrophes — a fire, an explosion, a massacre, a wave of disappearances — spaced at roughly twenty-seven-year intervals, each ending in the town declining to investigate. The implication is a feeding period followed by a long dormancy, and the number is what makes the sequel's 2016 setting possible.

What happens to Georgie?

He is killed in the first five minutes. Pennywise takes his arm off at the shoulder in the storm drain and pulls him in, and his body is never recovered, which is what allows Bill to spend the film insisting he is alive. In the lair Bill finds Georgie's raincoat and a mound of remains, and the one genuinely cruel beat in the film is Pennywise appearing as Georgie to ask Bill why he abandoned him.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

The threat at 014 is near the supernatural floor — only 8 works score lower. Henry Bowers and Beverly's father are both genuinely dangerous humans, but the thing the film is about is neither.

Viscera 058 is above the median — 70 works score lower. A severed arm, a decapitation, a burning, a bitten face and a room of corpses, most of it digital and quick.

Era bias 088 reads modern — 91 works score lower, which is the film's main aesthetic weakness: it is set in 1989 and shot and graded like 2017, with digital creature work in place of the latex the period would have used.

Pace 062 is on the shock side, with 83 works slower. The first act is unhurried; the back half runs a set piece every few minutes.

Tone 040 is unusually high for the subject matter — 88 works score lower. The children win, survive, and are shown to love each other.

Reality anchor 062 leans towards dream logic — 70 works score lower. The house on Neibolt Street has no reliable interior and the lair obeys nothing.

On jump scares: constant, and heavily over-produced. Almost every one arrives with a bass drop.