While watching John Krasinski’s new film IF, I was reminded of the 2016 David Frankel movie Collateral Beauty. If you remember this movie at all, you would remember a trailer and advertising campaign that promised a very warm, family-friendly holiday-themed film, that totally hid the dark, mean-spirited story the film was really telling. Advertising for IF is selling the film as a very whimsical, joyful, colorful summer confection for kids. However, there’s a lot going on here that trailers for IF are not telling you. There’s Collateral Beauty level audience bamboozling happening here.

IF follows Bea (Cailey Fleming), a 12-year old girl whose mother has recently died, and has moved into her grandmother’s apartment in New York City, after her father (Krasinski) has suffered his own medical crisis. She encounters a neighbor (Ryan Reynolds) who seemingly has control over a group of imaginary friends (IFs), whose original children have forgotten about them, and need to be placed with new ones.

We meet a lot of IFs, voiced by seemingly every big name to currently exist in Hollywood. We have the main IF, Blue, a big purple thing seemingly pre-approved by the merchandising department, voiced by Steve Carell, who is very depressed but also extroverted and he becomes annoying almost immediately. We also have Phoebe Waller-Bridge, John Krasinski himself, Emily Blunt, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, Matt Damon, Awkwafina, Bill Hader, Keegan Michael Key, Blake Lively, Sebastian Maniscalco, Richard Jenkins, Christopher Meloni, Maya Rudolph, Amy Schumer, Brad Pitt, Jon Stewart, Sam Rockwell and the late Louis Gossett Jr. in voice performances as various IFs, and it’s almost exhausting keeping up with all of them.

Krasinski has stated his goal here would be to direct a movie his children could watch, and to make sort of a live-action Pixar movie. If you know that going in, you have a better idea of what to expect. He’s going for some sort of genuine emotional catharsis and the movie doesn’t get there very often. The movie itself is not whimsical or fun enough for children, and isn’t smart or thoughtful enough for adults. He wanted to make a film that had as much to offer adults as children, and yet it doesn’t really click for either, at least from this viewer’s perspective. And it leads me to wonder who this movie was really for, as it seems to be for almost no one? Maybe it’s for the mentally ill child that exists in every viewer?

The bits of genuine humanity to exist in IF are solely due to the expressive, emotional performance of the young Cailey Fleming, who has a monologue near the end that was enough to have me on the verge of tears. But that was the only point that really got me, and IF is a movie that desperately wants the viewer to cry. It wants to be this tribute to childhood, and a reminder to never leave the concept of childlike wonder behind you. But everyone in this movie is depressed, and everyone’s experiencing loss and heartache and there’s a curious lack of joy. It’s full of plot and lacking in wonder. A significant portion of the IFs live in what looks like a nursing home for forgotten cartoon characters who are about to fade away. An image of a human-sized cat who’s in a nursing home room sitting in front of a TV constantly about to cry, stuck with me. There’s a lot going on here that is shockingly bleak.

Written and directed by Krasinski, who previously made the megahit horror film A Quiet Place and its sequel, scored by the great Michael Giacchino, who seems to think this film is a lot more charming than it is, shot by Steven Spielberg’s regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, who previously shot similarly whimsical family fare like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Schindler’s List, there’s a lot of elements here that don’t suggest the best team-up for a big-budget family adventure. And if Krasinski is simply trying to emulate a live-action Pixar movie, the story of the forgotten imaginary friend was already done to greater effectiveness in Inside Out almost a decade ago. He’s maybe trying to expand on the ideas that film brought up? But I’m not entirely sure what Krasinski was trying to accomplish here.

Taken at face value for what it is and not what it’s trying to sell audiences, IF might be seen as a genuinely sweet, heartfelt tribute to childhood wonder and a reminder to never let that part of yourself die. However, this is a big-budget tentpole summer movie advertised as a joyful family movie and when audiences sit down in the theater, they’re bound to find something else entirely – something a lot darker and more sad, but never as introspective or compelling as it needs to be to pull that off. But if you can go with that, and if you are satisfied emotionally with the narrative here, I hope you find more to take away from this experience than I did. I was never really charmed, and rarely moved. Mainly I was just bored.