Imaginary is by and large another junky PG-13 horror film that is thrown into theaters by the studios to take up space when there isn’t much else to put out, so it can get a modest return on investment in the box office during the first weekend before interest dips in the following weekends. It’s directed by Jeff Wadlow, who also shares a co-writing credit with Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, and it follows Jessica (DeWanda Wise), who moves into her childhood home with her husband Max (Tom Payne) and two stepdaughters Alice (Pyper Braun) and Taylor (Taegen Burns), but things take a turn when Alice’s new imaginary friend becomes more malevolent.
This imaginary friend takes the form of a basic teddy bear, and it goes by the name Chauncey, which is…just a very strange name. Everything seems perfectly normal at first, but Alice becomes more and more connected to Chauncey. And eventually, it supposedly tells her to complete a set of tasks that will let her be taken to a special place. And Jessica learns more and more about this, we begin to unpack more about the trauma that she experienced as a child, and how it might form a solution to what they’re dealing with right now.
The film isn’t doing a lot that we haven’t seen before. If you’ve seen any number of movies about some evil entity attaching itself somehow to a child, seducing them to their ways, then you’d be able to call out basically most of the plot beats long before they happen. Even the few reveals they try to throw in to spice things up aren’t especially inventive. In fact, some of them are ones you might see coming. I won’t go as far as to say it feels like it’s been written by AI, but it does have a very “first draft” quality to a lot of the writing that holds it back from really diving deeper into some of the ideas surrounding trauma and grief and familial bonds.
DeWanda Wise is hilariously overqualified, giving the material so much more heft than you might expect. She did not need to go as hard as she did, but it did help keep things mildly compelling at the very least. And I also think her dynamic with the kids is really strong. That core relationship is the heart of the film, and the actors overall do the best they can given the material handed to them. But most of the performances do come across as flat or a bit awkward.
The film isn’t especially scary, as it mainly goes through a lot of the typical buildups you’d see in a modern horror movie. Only a couple moments had real bits of tension to them. But also, Wadlow just can’t make the teddy bear scary, no matter how often he tries to cut to it with a booming Bear McCreary scored stinger. It doesn’t look threatening and often resulted in giggles from the audience that I was with. But I will say that the third act was genuinely fun to watch, as the film shifted into spook house mode with characters entering another realm with fun sets and guys in monster costumes, it’s the only point where the film really got creative – even if it’s basically the Further from the Insidious franchise.
There’s not a whole lot to dig into with Imaginary. It feels like a mashup of various movies and tropes you’ve seen before, and there isn’t much about this story that either says anything interesting or moves you on an emotional level. It’s a thoroughly standard B-horror movie that lacks the kind of personality to give it anything especially memorable or compelling. It’s not the worst I’ve seen this year by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a thoroughly mediocre and forgettable one. DeWanda Wise giving it her all and the almost the entirety of the final act were elements that I really enjoyed, but that still isn’t enough to make this worthy of being pushed to audiences who want something to see this weekend. The only thing interesting about this doesn’t even have anything to do with the movie, so much as it is about the fact that this is releasing fairly close to John Krasinski’s family comedy Imaginary Friends. Now that’s a crossover waiting to happen.
Imaginary is now out in theaters.