‘Ick’ TIFF Review – Joseph Kahn Delivers An Entertaining, Uneven Horror Comedy

You know a Joseph Kahn film when you see one. There’s an approach to style, narrative, and editing akin to pure adrenaline; it’s as though the filmmaker drank a bunch of coffee, ate a bunch of candy, and then immediately made a movie.

Ick, Kahn’s first feature since 2017’s Bodies, is pure sugar/caffeine rush: when it’s on a high, the film is dazzlingly fun and entertaining (sugar high!). But when the blood sugar crashes, Ick’s lows prove extremely uneven and a little frustrating.

In true Kahn form, Ick opens with energy to spare. An extended montage introduces Hank Wallace (Brandon Routh, rocking a terrible early 2000s wig) and his perfectly cliché high school life. He’s got it all: Hank is the quarterback of the football team, he’s primed for a College scholarship, and he’s dating head cheerleader Staci (Mena Suvari).

Everything goes awry when he blows out his knee during a game. The injury wasn’t an accident though; the all-pervasive Ick, a kind of plant-based alien goo that is so ubiquitous that no one pays it any attention, gripped his ankle as he was tackled. The result is a career-ending injury and a limp for the rest of the film.

Fast forward a few decades. Hank has stayed behind in Eastbrook, acknowledged his alcoholism, and become a science teacher while still pining away for Staci. She also stayed in town – marrying nerdy Ted Kim (Peter Wong) with whom she has a thriving real estate business, as well as a teenage daughter, Grace (Melina Pauli Weissman).

The plot kicks in when the previously unobtrusive Ick enters its “kinetic” phase and begins attacking, infecting and absorbing living creatures. Kahn and his co-writers Dan Koontz and Samuel Laskey don’t so much build up this development as lob it into the narrative like a grenade. There are a few moments of sentience, sure, but one day the Ick is a gross inconvenience and the next it is attacking and consuming an entire party of high schoolers. It’s the narrative equivalent of going from zero to 60.

The resulting action is propulsive and the violence is plentiful: the Ick is just as likely to gobble people up as it is to rip them in half. Occasionally it also infects victims and turns them into zombies, insidiously lurking under their skin with black veins and clouding their eyes white.

The Ick’s attacks are most often played for gross-out effects, for laughs, or both. Not unlike Kahn’s 2011 divisive break-out Detention, Ick is a horror comedy, with a wide arsenal of comedic tools ranging from slapstick to amusing needle drops to full-on satire.

Routh is the centerpiece and he negotiates the film’s tonal shifts between comedy, action and heartfelt family drama with ease. Hank is an archetypal character: he peaked in high school and now has to undergo the “loser to hero” trajectory. Routh’s easy smile and solid paternal chemistry with Weissman makes an easy sell of the film’s domestic drama subplot.

Weismann, meanwhile, is a delightful surprise. The A Series of Unfortunate Events actress has great comedic timing and Grace’s acerbic tongue and quick wit plays equally well off Hank’s “aw shucks” nice guy and her boyfriend Dylan (Harrison Cone). She and Dylan are clearly wrong for each other, but  – in one of the film’s many contemporary comedy bits – he is the 80s stereotype flipped on its head. Instead of being a racist/homophobe/misogynist, the film’s secondary antagonist is a woke douchebag who weaponizes political correctness for clout.

This is one of several contemporary targets that Kahn, Koontz and Laskey lampoon. Following the house party attack, the Army rolls in under the supervision of no-nonsense Doctor Althea Prentice. In one of the film’s most cutting moments of humour, Prentice holds a town meeting at the local Smal-Mart (the most important establishment in town) and outlines that the residents must barricade themselves indoors.

When parents realize that this means no prom, the crowd immediately rebels: it’s government interference, there are accusations of conspiracy, and someone even claims that this is a hoax and crisis actors were used (Kahn just pans the camera over to reveal a row of body bags containing dead children).

It’s not subtle, but that’s Kahn’s style and he has plenty to spare. Audiences seeking scares, or tension, or characters making smart and informed decisions should definitely move on, because Ick isn’t that kind of film. It’s a movie that will make a joke about Creed being *the* quintessential band of the late 90s/early 2000s, and then use one of the band’s tracks in a key set piece.

Sidebar: For millennials of a certain age, the film’s 2000s era soundtrack is absolute catnip and yes, ‘Staci’s Mom’ does play.

The film’s inherent silliness is undoubtedly a large part of its charm, but following the house party attack, Ick struggles mightily with its pacing and its narrative.

There’s the obvious joke that residents of Eastbrook have their priorities wrong because no one reacts to the deaths or the Army’s advice with any real fear or concern. For example: people still go necking at the bluffs after dark and they still go to prom.

This works decently as political commentary, especially following the real life responses to COVID or the latest school shooting…or at least it does until Ick asks its audience to invest in the safety and well-being of its characters in the last act. When the whole town is under attack in the extended climax, it’s hard to muster the enthusiasm to care when all of the supporting characters are so forgettable. Despite the questions about his paternity, accusations of shallow characterization and poor motivations even apply to Hank and Grace.

The two other significant issues are that there’s no consistency in what the Ick can and cannot do, and the effects are not practical. There’s a Rorschach-like blottiness to the way the Ick creeps and moves beneath doors and throw air vents that is visually interesting and gives the supernatural entity its own personality, but when the set pieces go big or when editor Chancler Haynes leans into Kahn’s music video tendencies, Ick simply becomes a poor CGI imitation of the sci-fi films it is referencing (including Chuck Russell’s vastly better looking The Blob remake, which Hank watches with his father Andy, played by Jeff Fahey).

And then there’s the issue of what the Ick can and can’t do, which changes based on the needs of the plot. At various points in the film, the goop is restricted by closed geographies like locked doors and cars; at other times, it can simply break through glass as it sees fit. This is especially glaring when Hank and Grace become trapped in an overturned car for an extended sequence. Ordinarily the Ick would have no problem getting them, but for no other reason than plot armour, here the car/glass is a bubble that the goo can’t penetrate. There’s no rhyme or reason to the way things work, which feels sloppy and inconsistent.

This mixed with the slight characters, an emphasis on increasingly bloated action spectacle and a poorly paced climax with multiple false endings turns the last act into something of a slog. It’s disappointing because this is when the stakes should be at their highest. Instead, like the Creed song, Ick is tone-deaf.

Overall the film is a mostly fun horror comedy with extremely game performances from Routh and Weissman. The film needs more careful plotting  and fewer ups and downs with regard to the pacing, which would have helped Ick properly build to a climax with stakes.

For fans of Detention, this probably all sounds familiar and acceptable. Compared to Kahn’s last film, howev8er, Ick does represent something of a step back from the strengths of Bodied.

Ick had its world premiere at TIFF 2024. Release into TBD.