“Imaginary” Review
A family falls victim to a demonic entity masquerading as an imaginary friend in “Imaginary”.
If you enjoy horror, then Blumhouse Productions is an instantly recognizable name. It’s a studio that I respect for making lower-budgeted films, often in the horror genre, and giving filmmakers more freedom. It’s led to smash hits like “M3GAN”, “The Black Phone” and “Split” as well as critically acclaimed masterworks like “Get Out” and “BlacKkKlansman”. However, if I may rework part of Cord Jefferson’s speech when he won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for “American Fiction” as my personal plea to Blumhouse, “instead of making one $200 million movie, try making twenty $10 million movies, or fifty $4 million movies” with purpose. We need purpose because “Imaginary”, Blumhouse’s latest film, doesn’t feel like it was made to be an imaginative horror film, it feels like a lackluster effort to pad out a studio’s catalog. With no scares, a slow pace and rough writing, “Imaginary” takes an interesting premise and crushes any of its potential.
After marrying a musician named Max (Tom Payne) and subsequently becoming a stepmother to Max’s children, teenaged Taylor (Taegen Burns) and young Alice (Pyper Bruan), Jessica (DeWanda Wise) moves her new family into her childhood home. While they adjust to a new, suburban life, Alice finds an old teddy bear named Chauncey and begins talking to it, leading everyone else to think that she has developed an imaginary friend. However, when Alice begins to behave strangely and bad things start to happen in the house, Jessica, whose repressed childhood memories are emerging, begins to realize that this friend is more real than she believed and has a sinister plan.
Maybe because “Imaginary” also focused on a family being terrorized by a mysterious entity in the shadows but this film reminded me so much of last year’s “The Boogeyman”, a pretty underrated horror film, if everything was done wrong. While I don’t like to harp on actors too much, the acting in this film is awful mainly because the script gives them such clunky dialogue to work with. After all, DeWanda Wise has turned in outstanding performances in the past, notably her turn as Nola Darling in Spike Lee’s Netflix series adaptation of his classic film “She’s Gotta Have It”, but this isn’t one of them. Poor Pyper Braun has a massive task to pull off by playing this child who is being influenced by a dark entity and there are a few scenes where she does a solid job (I got a strong sense of just how hard she was trying) but the script’s shortcomings are just too much. You just don’t care about these characters and when the only kill of the film happens, I just said “thank God” because I really wanted this annoying person to just die. It wasn’t nearly satisfying enough.
The film’s dialogue is so expository that it makes “Madame Web” seem like it was written by Aaron Sorkin. If you were to take a shot for every time a character made a statement about someone’s backstory, you would have died the same death as John Bonham before the 30 minute mark. This entire film feels like it was shot using the first draft of the script and it uses every tired cliché of bad horror. There’s a dream sequence that barely ties into anything (that’s how the film starts), plenty of jump scares where the payoff isn’t even threatening, needless lore around the creature and, worst of all, they show the monster’s true form way too early. Plus, they have the gall to compare Chauncey (which isn’t a scary name for a horror monster) to Bing-Bong from “Inside Out”. If I may paraphrase another Oscars moment, “keep Bing-Bong’s name out your fucking mouth!”
While the film is a failure of the genre, it doesn’t even take enough risks to be a blunder that entertains for different reasons than the filmmaker intended. Films such as “Cats” and “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” took big chances and fell so flat that it was an entertaining experience. To watch them was to go insane and feel the joyous roar of ironic laughter. Watching “Imaginary” produces a different kind of insanity. It’s a dull experience that practically makes you catatonic to the point where you’re praying that Chief smothers you with a pillow like he did to Jack Nicholson’s Randle McMurphy in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. How is it that this film, that only runs an hour and 44 minutes, feels longer than the three-and-a-half hour “Killers of the Flower Moon”?
While the film has a good idea and even some creative imagery in the last 15 minutes, it’s not even enough to make “Imaginary” tolerable which is a shame since imaginary friends could really work in cinema. Mark my words, the upcoming John Krasinski film “IF”, which also focuses on imaginary friends and is geared towards families, is probably going to be more mature, sincere and, well, imaginative than the horror film meant for adults.
