“IF” completely missed the mark for me on the writing front. It wasn’t terribly cohesive in its storytelling, and I found the concept of the girl spending a surprise summer with her grandmother - who she apparently hasn’t spent real time with in years since her mother died, though her father is inexplicably having a medical procedure away from their actual home, or something? - mostly because it isn’t actually established if it’s summer or not. My kid leaned over around the third morning the child woke up and asked, “Is she going to go to school now?” I don’t know, kiddo. I have no real idea what’s going on.
Don’t even get me started on the manufactured tension of the father’s illness. We don’t know what he’s suffering from, but he evidently needs to spend several days in a hospital prior to having surgery. We don’t ever see any of the child’s actual mourning process over losing her mother. We just know she’s dead at the start - lazy, lazy, to say the least. Bea cries over the idea of losing him, sits at his side after being told nonchalantly by the nurse that he just needs rest after having a hard day in surgery, and runs out to announce his (seemingly miraculous) awakening as if he’s been unconscious for weeks. Like, for real? He didn’t even look remotely ill!
Her father is so flamboyant and boistrous, I was certain we would see some kind of connection between his attitude and persona tied in with Cal. Nope.
Spoiler Alert - the “Sixth Sense”-esque reveal at the end was fairly predictable by the third act. Honestly, it would’ve been even better if there had been some kind of explanation as to why she was “chosen” to see the IFs in the first place, or if we’d have some kind of hint as to Cal’s identity and why he was so invested in helping the IFs. We don’t ever get to see how she played with him as a child, how she was familiar with the upstairs of the building, why the old woman was so creepy when we first met her? So disjointed.
I think my biggest frustration was not understanding the fate of the IFs. So they reconnect with their “kids” as adults. They glow. And...then what? They go back to the retirement home, happy that they had a single connection? I half expected Blue to melt into Bobby Moynihan and “become one” with his adult creator as one might’ve been with a child. But nope. And then Blue goes back to the retirement place, where they’re all happy for him. They clearly do not disappear. So... where’s the motivation to care about their lost children if they have it pretty good where they are?
It would’ve been a very powerful ending if Cal had morphed into her father in the clown suit. Because he seemed to be a stand-in for him all along. The writing didn’t take it that way, though, so it seemed very strange that all the IFs were clearly cartoonish, but hers was a person. A person she met with and interacted with. She could clearly see him. Wouldn’t that have...you know...made him glow from the get-go?
Anyway, anyone with a kid knows the most bonkers part was the idea a kid her age would’ve ever had an IF that was a clown. Because as we all know without doubt - clowns are terrifying.
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