It Chapter 2: Every Character Ranked Worst To Best

6. Beverly Marsh - Jessica Chastain/Sophia Lillis

Despite how well Jessica Chastain is cast here and how wonderful Sophia Lillis was as Bev in the first movie, she's rather unfortunately under-nourished in the second film. We get to see more of her backstory than most of the others, because as well as just seeing what she does now (as if that offers an insight into what an adult is entirely), we see that she ended up in a relationship like the one she had with her abusive father.

From there though, aside for the excellent sequence that sees her terrorised by Mrs Kersch in her old apartment, we get too little of Bev that isn't tied into the perception of others of her. She's key to Ben's arc (what there is of it) and she's brought in as a component for Bill's identity crisis, but beyond that it's a little hollow.

She never gets a chance to really stand up for herself and cast off her abusive past - which you sit and wait for for a couple of hours - and instead, she ends up with her new romantic partner by the end because she finds out he wrote her a poem and now he's handsome. If that sounds reductive, it's because the script doesn't offer much else.

Lillis' return is more successful when she's shown in flashbacks - rather hauntingly when she's shown appeasing her abusive father - and when she becomes an instrument of It's fear, she's at her best.