It

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

It is set in Derry, Maine, across an opening in 1988 and the summer of 1989, a place where ordinary streets, storm drains and a shuttered house seem to conceal a long pattern of children vanishing. In the earlier autumn, Bill Denbrough’s younger brother Georgie disappears after a paper boat slips into a storm drain during a rainstorm. Bill is left with grief and guilt, and his parents have withdrawn into their own sorrow. When Bill’s friends begin seeing a frightening clown and other impossible visions, he refuses to accept that Georgie is simply gone. His search draws together a group of outcasts who discover the town’s danger is shared.

Bill’s friends Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak and Stanley Uris already know what it means to be bullied, though they cope in different ways. Richie talks to cover his nerves, Eddie is anxiously protected by an overbearing mother, and Stan tries to keep order through habit. They encounter Ben Hanscom, a new boy who has been researching Derry’s history and finds evidence of repeated disasters and missing children. Beverly Marsh, who faces isolation at school and fear at home, becomes another point of connection. As each child experiences a different apparition, the group begins to suspect that one creature is tailoring its shape to each person’s fears. Mike Hanlon joins after the others help defend him against Henry Bowers. His fear recalls the fire that killed his parents, adding another private loss to the group's understanding of the creature.

They call themselves the Losers Club and work out that the presence seems to wake about every twenty-seven years, feeding on children and moving through the town’s sewers. Bill draws a map of the underground system and connects it to a well beneath the abandoned house on Neibolt Street. When the clown attacks in Bill’s garage, the friends stop treating their experiences as separate nightmares. They enter the house to confront it, but Pennywise separates them and makes each face a private terror. Beverly wounds it with a metal spike; the creature retreats after hurting Ben, and the shaken group breaks apart rather than continuing the fight.

The separation does not make them safe. Beverly confronts her abusive father and incapacitates him, but Pennywise abducts her. Bill, Ben, Richie, Eddie, Stan and Mike reunite to go after her. Henry Bowers, one of the older bullies, has been driven into a murderous state by the creature; he attacks the group, and Mike pushes him down the well. The children descend into the sewers, where Pennywise’s lair turns their suspicions about missing children into something visible: old circus props, abandoned belongings and bodies floating above the floor. Their friendship has become the only dependable resource each can bring to the encounter.

Pennywise exposes Beverly to the Deadlights, leaving her unresponsive. Ben’s kiss brings her back, and the group confronts the clown together. Bill sees Georgie and nearly accepts the illusion, but recognizes the figure as Pennywise wearing his brother’s shape. The creature offers to spare the others if they abandon Bill; they refuse and attack, with each child overcoming a fear that had previously made them vulnerable. They beat Pennywise until it retreats down the well. Bill then finds Georgie’s bloodstained raincoat and grieves openly while his friends stay beside him. They have stopped the immediate threat, but the film does not pretend the loss can be reversed.

As summer ends, Beverly tells the group she saw a vision of them fighting Pennywise again as adults. The friends make a blood oath to return if the creature ever comes back, giving their victory a shadow of future responsibility. The others begin to disperse, and Beverly says she is moving away to live with her aunt. Bill tells her he has feelings for her, and they share a kiss before she leaves. The ending belongs to the children and to the temporary world they built together; it closes their first confrontation without showing the adult chapter of the story.

The film’s horror comes from the way a community can normalize disappearance and avoid acknowledging what its children are enduring. Adults generally do not see the manifestations that torment the Losers, leaving the kids to compare evidence and decide whether to believe one another. Derry’s familiar places become unstable through that gap: a drain, a bathroom sink, a library and a derelict house can turn into gateways for personal fears. Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise performs friendliness as a lure, changing from clownish invitation to menace, while the children’s group scenes give the story room for humor and awkward affection between its frightening encounters.

Andy Muschietti adapts the childhood portion of Stephen King’s novel as a coming-of-age horror story, with Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman credited for the screenplay. The young cast carries the ensemble through different emotional registers: Jaeden Lieberher’s Bill turns loss into determination, Sophia Lillis’s Beverly resists the limits placed on her, and Finn Wolfhard’s Richie fills silences with jokes. The story’s Losers Club is not just a set of characters who happen to share a monster; it is the group that lets them name what is happening and face it together. Their promise to return ends this film on friendship, fear and a threat that has retreated but not vanished from Derry’s history.