Imaginary [Review]
Imaginary doesn’t live up to the strength of its premise.
DeWanda Wise. Image credit: Parrish Lewis / Lionsgate
Imaginary from horror factory Blumhouse isn’t to be confused with Paramount’s IF, which releases in May. Competing studios often release movies with similar concepts but it’s unusual that they be in completely disparate genres. The thought of people mistaking horror film Imaginary with family picture IF, both riffing on the idea of imaginary friends, is very funny to me, but it’s unlikely it’ll happen as frequently as I’d hope since there’s a gulf between the movies’ release dates.
Jessica (DeWanda Wise) is a children’s book author with a creative block. She recently married Max (Tom Payne) and gained two stepdaughters, young Alice (Pyper Braun) and teen Taylor (Taegen Burns). Together they move to Jessica’s childhood home to start fresh.
Alice, fragile from a traumatic ordeal with her biological mom, finds a stuffed bear named Chauncey in the house and immediately becomes attached, calling him her friend. Jessica thinks Alice having an imaginary friend is cute, but soon Chauncey’s games become dangerous and Jessica must act because the bear isn’t what it seems. Imaginary takes the imaginary friend concept loosely because in its world, imaginary friends aren’t so imaginary and can sometimes be monsters out to consume children.
Pyper Braun. Image credit: Parrish Lewis / Lionsgate
The plot points of the first half of the film are predictable but the second half goes somewhere I didn’t expect. Once the concept evolves in the second half it becomes predictable again, but at least the movie gets more interesting. There’s a particular character plot twist in the second half that was not only predictable, but completely unnecessary, revealed in an over the top scene that I don’t think was supposed to come off as funny. At least we get to see Chauncey’s true form near the end. My favorite part of the film is his design.
Imaginary has two big exposition dumps accompanying some major events in the film that could have been handled more elegantly. The second of these is more egregious. I’d chalk it up to either poor writing or the need to keep the running time under two hours.
While watching Imaginary, it was hard to stop thinking about some surface similarities to Poltergeist (1982) and how much better the latter movie handles the tropes it uses. Unfortunately director Jeff Wadlow isn’t the master that Poltergeist’s Tobe Hooper is. Imaginary simply isn’t as fun, sometimes even feeling sluggish; the movie felt longer than its short running time. Imaginary’s premise is wasted with its lackluster execution. Stream Blumhouse’s January release Night Swim instead.
Imaginary opened on March 8 and is in theaters now.
