IF (2024)

If the cinema maintains a retirement home for forgotten premises, IF has taken up residence there with a name tag and a mild expression. John Krasinski writes and directs a story about a twelve-year-old girl, Bea, who can see the imaginary friends left behind by grown-ups who stopped needing them. Ryan Reynolds plays a neighbor afflicted the same way. The cast is pleasant. The animation is committed. The plot wanders Brooklyn like a tourist without a map, and the critical reception (a shrug, broadly) suggests audiences found it sweet enough to forgive.

The ensemble carries a measure of diversity, with Louis Gossett Jr., Alan Kim, and Liza Colón-Zayas among the supporting players, though the film never pauses to make anything of it. That is fine. It is also the entire extent of the gesture. Bea is a girl, and her grandmother Margaret is granted a childhood dream of dancing that the film restores to her, a small and welcome acknowledgment that older women once wanted things. No argument is advanced. The movie has no interest in arguments.

Where the film does lean, gently, is toward the notion that adulthood is a trap of deadlines and forgotten wonder. A businessman chases a deal, has misplaced his inner child, and is cured of his anxiety by a purple monster named Blue. The system survives untouched, and the deal proceeds. The moral arrives soft, a bedtime reminder that children should be allowed to be children. IF means well. It simply has nothing to say that has not been said before, and it says it in a voice calibrated to offend no one, which is its own kind of achievement and its own kind of limit.