What If (2014)

What If, also known as The F Word in territories spared the MPAA's delicate sensibilities, is a 2014 romantic comedy about a medical school dropout and an animator who agree to be friends while chemistry does its patient work. The film is pleasant, well acted, and almost aggressively conventional. Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan have an easy rapport, and the Toronto locations give the thing a lived-in texture. The cultural inventory, however, is sparse. The cast is white, the worldview is heteronormative by default, and the movie has no interest in race, class, climate, or any other item on the contemporary progressive checklist. This is not a failure of moral seriousness. It is simply a romantic comedy from 2014 that wants to be charming and largely succeeds.

The film's single glancing engagement with social consciousness is a mild, unexamined feminism: Chantry works, has opinions, and eventually chooses her own professional path. That is worth a nod, not a parade. Elsewhere the movie is silent. No LGBTQ characters or themes, no racial consciousness, no economic critique, no body-positive gesture, no environmental sermon. The script's attempts at humor include a running strain of ableist gags, which critics have flagged. That is not neurodivergent representation; it is the opposite, and it leaves the film with nothing to claim in that column. The lecture energy is nil. Nobody stands in front of a whiteboard to explain the audience's moral obligations, and the film is more agreeable for it.

What remains is a modest genre exercise with sharp dialogue and a soft center. It is the cinematic equivalent of a competent burger, as a critic put it, and the kitchen knows its menu. The film asks nothing of its audience beyond a willingness to watch two attractive people delay the inevitable. That is a legitimate pleasure. It is also why the film registers so low on the present cultural barometer. Social consciousness is not a moral requirement for a rom-com. It is, however, a measurable ingredient, and this one has almost none. The result is a time capsule from a moment when a white-cast Toronto romance could be marketed as an indie twist on an old formula and nobody felt the need to announce a theme. We can respect the restraint. We can also note the emptiness where the themes would go.