Andy Muschietti

A son wants his mother back, and for the first hour of The Flash (2023), Andy Muschietti keeps that wish in view. Ezra Miller’s two Barrys and Michael Keaton’s grumpy Bruce Wayne make room for humour without losing the hurt. We were angry when the callbacks took over, because a film that had earned our interest in that son began asking us to applaud familiar material instead. The frustration is how well he had begun.

His feature debut, Mama (2013), expanded his short Mamá (2008), with Barbara Muschietti producing and co-writing. The move to Stephen King’s It (2017) gave him a gang of children whose company mattered as much as the threat. Muschietti kept that group in focus for the length of the film, giving the audience people worth worrying about before asking them to be frightened. That attention to the children makes his later difficulty keeping hold of his characters more frustrating.

It Chapter Two (2019), scripted by Gary Dauberman, tries to make the adult Losers’ Club feel the weight of fears they have not outgrown. Bill Hader supplies wit and Bill Skarsgård menace, so there are good reasons to keep watching. But Muschietti repeatedly lets a joke break the suspense, then works through another scare much like the last. At 169 minutes, the repetition becomes hard to excuse. The actors are capable of making those old fears hurt, but the direction keeps interrupting them just when the film needs to let their unease settle.

His move into television as a creator and episode director on the prequel series IT: Welcome to Derry (2025) keeps him with Stephen King’s material. We would like to see him give a frightening scene time to work before reaching for a joke or the next creature. He has already demonstrated that he can sustain our interest in a group; repeating the threat is not enough to sustain it again. For evidence of what he can do when those people hold his attention, we would start with It.