Romantic comedies didn’t always carry with them the air of immediate dismissal, that eye-rolling weariness born of dozens of interchangeable boy-meets-girl plots and posters featuring stars playfully leaning into or on one another. Romance at the movies wasn’t always overfilled with cliches, stuffed with safe jokes heard a hundred times before. The rom-com can be a place for actual characters instead of cardboard theater-lobby displays, right? People you actually want to see get together for reasons other than the fact that that’s what’s supposed to happen in these movies?
What If doesn’t ask “what if” that were true. It just answers with a confident “yes.”
The film was originally titled The F Word, and it still carries that title in most markets that aren’t the U.S., making one wonder just how easily offended the distributor thinks we are (the F-word in question is “friends”). Fortunately, the newer, blander title is really the only thing generic about What If. Adapted and expanded by screenwriter Elan Mastai from a fringe festival play by Canadian playwrights TJ Dawe and Mike Rinaldi, the film manages a neat trick of sticking close to formula while still being unexpectedly fresh.
Part of that is just how self-aware Mastai’s script is, without really wandering into self-referential navel-gazing. Everything is familiar, but slightly off-kilter, like walking into your home to find all the furniture shifted a few inches from where it normally sits. Daniel Radcliffe plays Wallace, a med school dropout who meets Chantry (Zoe Kazan) at a party and falls for her quickly; only to find out after he walks her home that she lives with her boyfriend and is just looking for new friends, though the connection between them is undeniable.
It takes a long time to reveal that boyfriend, and when we do finally meet up with Ben (Rafe Spall), we’re treated to a quick moment of (not so) irrational jealousy before we discover that despite being the long-term boyfriend we’re supposed to be rooting against, he’s actually not really a bad guy. The film keeps teasing us with moments where it might make him into a cheater, a neglecter, a monster of some sort; and then director Michael Dowse refuses to let us off the hook. It has to be just as hard for us to hate Ben as it is for Chantry to throw him over for Wallace, no matter how charming he is.