IF’s ending, explained: Millennial nostalgia-bait turns weird and toxic

Who is IF for? Looking at any of the film’s marketing or the trailer, the answer seems easy: kids. But after seeing IF, written and directed by John Krasinski (a considerable departure from his A Quiet Place movies), that answer stops seeming so simple. This “family comedy” isn’t particularly family-friendly, or particularly comedic. There are, at most, a handful of lines resembling jokes. Judging by the restlessness of the children in my screening, it isn’t for them at all.

IF feels more like a film targeted at millennial parents: It’s overflowing with symbols of millennial childhood. Characters listen to music on cherished vinyl records, and tap into their memories not on iPhones, but on old video cameras. Cellphones aren’t part of this world. Everything from the carnival rides to the furniture seems to come from the 1990s.

Plot-wise, that focus on millennial nostalgia makes sense. IF centers on 12-year-old Bea (Cailey Fleming), who recently lost her mother, and may soon lose her father (John Krasinski) as well: He’s about to have heart surgery. Bea discovers she and her neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) can see other people’s abandoned imaginary friends, and they launch a quest to reunite these “IF”s with the kids who imagined them, in order to keep the IFs – and people’s imaginations — alive.

IF is all about how comforting and wonderful nostalgia is. This is an extremely familiar theme in current culture. Marketing trends have been pushing the nostalgia agenda. The same thing is happening in pop culture, with popular ’80s and ’90s films and shows from Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Rugrats to Top Gun and Toy Story being rebooted and reimagined. This constant refreshing of the old is known as nostalgia-bait. Even ostensibly new shows like Stranger Things are kept alight by the warm, enticing glow of nostalgia.

While it can be exhausting to exist in a world that seems terrified of anything new, the rampant obsession with and reliance on nostalgia does make sense. Millennials have faced endlessly increasing costs, poor job stability, and a climate crisis with no end in sight, making it seem impossible to get a leg up. We’re the first generation to be worse off than the one before. Wanting to retreat backward into familiar, comforting childhood wish-fulfillment is a logical next step.

Krasinski’s film, however, employs nostalgia-bait in the worst imaginable way. Instead of rehashing familiar iconography to create new ideas, IF employs a barrage of fluffy, calorie-free whimsy, encouraging audiences to retreat backward into themselves and cling to the imaginary creatures from their childhood. The real world, it argues, is simply too hard, too painful.

Image: Paramount/Everett Collection

IF’s human characters are incapable of facing reality. Bea’s father is obsessed with using fantasy to make things easier for Bea. When we first see him in the hospital, he’s playing with his IV bag, which he’s dressed up with a wig to make it more appealing for his daughter. This infantilization — Bea constantly reminds him that she’s not a child, in a plea for an honest conversation — prevents her from being able to cope with the potential reality of losing both her parents at age 12. That’s a truly horrifying prospect, but IF treats Bea’s father like a hero, and is warmly receptive to both her retreat into the imaginary and the film’s eventual reminder that the past is exactly where she belongs.

Given that IF purports to celebrate the infinite nature of imagination, it’s telling that every IF in the movie is a generic variation of readily available toys, like stuffed animals, robots, and astronauts. Even the film’s primary IF, giant purple furry Blue (Steve Carell), is little more than a Grimace knock-off. Some IFs are, conceptually speaking, even lazier — a bubble, a banana, a sunflower, a giant gummy bear, a literal ice cube in a glass.

In fact, the one solitary chuckle I let out over the course of the movie’s 104-minute run time was when said ice cube (voiced by Bradley Cooper) reveals that his kid imagined him during a moment of thirst. The surprise factor on that line got me to laugh, but the joke is alarmingly hollow, and it gets to the root of the film’s problem. The best this kid could come up with to satisfy their thirst was a glass of water with an ice cube in it? Not, say, an infinite fountain of all their favorite flavors of lemonade and soft drinks, including flavors not yet conceived? Perhaps a free vending machine full of tantalizing, Willy Wonka-esque magical beverages? Or at least a glass of apple juice?

Image: Paramount/Everett Collection

If IF was a smarter movie, I’d take this parade of overly obvious, unimaginative imaginary characters to be a comment on how infantilized this forced obsession with nostalgia has become — a warning that our nostalgia-coddled minds are incapable of conjuring any legitimately original images, relying exclusively on variations of familiar themes. The most subversive interpretation of this movie is that Krasinski is actually saying all we can do is revel in our past, which is deeply concerning. But believing that would mean completely misunderstanding what IF is so blatantly meant to say.

[Ed. note: From here, major IF spoilers.]

The reunification between adults and their childhood imaginary friends is a key aspect of IF. A pivotal scene finds Blue discovering his creator-child Jeremy is now an ineffectual, anxiety-ridden adult (played by Bobby Moynihan), preparing for a big business meeting. Jeremy is deeply unhappy, you see, because he’s an adult, and there’s no joy in that. He can only find any semblance of joy in this unfeeling world when Bea and Cal help Jeremy remember Blue. The whimsy hits toxically high levels as Jeremy and Blue glow with an orange hue, and Michael Giacchino’s constant, over-the-top score signals that finally, Jeremy is at peace. As Jeremy retreats into his own childhood, he’s able to crush the meeting he was so worried about.

If the message wasn’t abundantly clear then, it becomes unavoidable in the film’s big reveal: Cal isn’t Bea’s neighbor, he’s her own childhood IF. The fact that our protagonist imagined a generic adult man as her imaginary friend really exposes how lazy this film thinks childhood imaginations are.

Image: Paramount/Everett Collection

But it’s more sinister than that, IF suggests: The only reason Bea was able to process her complicated feelings and the potential loss of her father was that she retreated from adolescence and dove head-first into the recesses of her early childhood. The film’s final sequence backs this up further, as the lost IFs are reunited with their adults, all of whom seem instantly transformed to see the creatures they created as kids. The resulting montage of loving, happy faces is meant to be tear-jerking, but it feels ugly — an absolute repudiation of reality and adult life, in favor of the emptiest, most imagination-drained fantasies possible.

Instead of nostalgia-bait, IF has created a nostalgia trap. This is a movie that vehemently rejects one of life’s greatest features — growth and development — and encourages us to live inside our pasts. It isn’t really any safer there. But as far as Krasinski and the filmmakers are concerned, at least pretending it is feels comforting.