My first trip to the theaters in 2024 was a disappointment. Yes, it’s March, yes, its post Oscar season, and yes, its Blumhouse horror. But I had elevated expectations that “Imaginary” failed to meet. You could even say I imagined something far scarier.
The blame goes all around. From director Jeff Wadlow to the trio of writers Wadlow, Greg Erb, and Jason Oremland, to terrible acting and effects. The result demonstrates that simplicity will always win when it comes to horror.
Jessica (DeWanda Wise) is moving back to her childhood home. There’s a dynamic at play – she is with her new husband, Max (Tom Payne) and Max’s two kids. There’s conflict in Jessica’s relationship with her stepchildren; Alice (Pyper Braun) is a youngster and Taylor (Taegen Burns) is the typical sullen teen.
Alice discovers a teddy bear in the basement she calls Chauncey. Chauncey becomes the imaginary best friend of Alice, and as she begins acting more bizarre, Jessica digs deeper into her own past at the house, and her own childhood demons with Chauncey.
This sounded like a great plot. Chauncey the bear is hardly Annabelle in appearance, and that’s okay. He has enough of a creep factor to him that some of the earlier scenes had the perfect amount of tension and chill just by his presence in the room. But the simplicity of the bear was overshadowed by the inclusion of too much stuff that the writers put in. The backstory, the attempted explanations, the addition of senseless characters – Chauncey the bear should have been the end of it.
The acting was subpar from everyone.
DeWanda Wise was given a bad script and didn’t pull off anything special. She’s an adult who seemed like she was a teenager with her actions and demeanor. For the duration, Wise’s acting felt wooden. And no one else helped. Both kids were over the top. The dad was a tool. A potential love interest was introduced in teenage neighbor Liam (Matthew Sato) but the character went nowhere. Next door neighbor Gloria (Betty Buckley) was there for unnatural exposition dumps. The dialogue came off as scripted, and ridiculous at times.
The film borrows quite liberally from “Insidious,” “Poltergeist,” “IT,” and you’ll spot that and others along the way. 1:45 was too long, and the death count kept things safe.
What should have been a simple horror movie about a kid and her imaginary friend gets way too complicated and fails because of it. The bear was creepy, and that should have been the end of it.
We’re almost halfway to Halloween. I would skip “Imaginary” at the theater, and eventually at home.
“Imaginary” is currently only in theaters
