Blumhouse Pictures continues its recent trend of PG-13 horror films where, much in the vein of Five Nights At Freddy’s (2023) and Night Swim (2024), horror elements are kneecapped to appeal to a mass audience of tweens and children with bare-bones exposure to the genre. Imaginary feels like an amalgamation of Blumhouse’s best operating at some of the genre’s worst tendencies. A few admirable performances and an adequate atmospheric construction can’t excuse what is ultimately a poor exercise in startling imagery and half-baked concepts of trauma, which has sadly become an albatross for horror; characters can’t be anything outside of traumatic childhoods that act as a poor metaphor for the adults they become.
The film follows Jessica (DeWanda Wise), who finds herself moving back into her childhood home with her husband, Max (Tom Payne), and his two daughters from his previous marriage: disgruntled teenager Taylor (Taegen Burns) and adorable Alice (Pyper Braun). Jessica spends her days as a children’s book writer and artist, funneling her childhood nightmares into cartoons to cope with her past. While Jessica and Max share a gooey-eyed albeit stilted and one-dimensional relationship, the more convincing dynamic lies between Jessica and her two step-daughters. Taylor views Jessica as an inauthentic replacement for their mom, but Alice is open to the relationship. Their shared time leads to Alice discovering Chauncey, an old teddy bear left in the basement.
Alice and Chauncey’s relationship quickly accelerates, and Alice starts exhibiting behavior that disturbs Jessica (Max is currently out of the picture, on tour with his band). Jessica and Taylor soon find themselves at the mercy of the unknown as Alice disappears with Chauncey into an imaginary dimension that looks like a cheapened M.C. Esher design done at the last minute. Now, Jessica and Taylor are helpless on how to rescue Alice.
In steps Jessica’s old babysitter, Gloria (Betty Buckley), who remembers Jessica’s relationship with her imaginary friends and fears Jessica’s imaginary friends has taken hold of Alice. These films all fall into the same uninspired trap: get a respected actor to come in mid-film and provide a gigantic expository dump where the machinations are revealed. With Imaginary, the film feels even more hamstrung by more plot and less thrills.
The film pivots into a fantastical dreamscape horror funhouse that takes bits from The Further in Insidious (2010). Still, it lacks the narrative cohesive structure that made The Further feel tactile and earned. So much of Imaginary is hindered by an abundance of dead space in which something creepy or ominous is behind an unsuspecting character. The audience should feel some foreboding sense of danger in these moments, yet all I can do is chuckle at how stale and tired these conventions have become from the constant output by a studio like Blumhouse.
The film never earns its scares or fake jolts of surprises, rendering such dark figures ineffectual. By the third act, the film seems less interested in atmosphere and tension and more engaged in being a funhouse zany horror film, as special effects pile on and anthropomorphize Chauncey into many crazed creations.
There is something to Wise’s calm and collected Jessica as she tries to navigate her newfound family and a house that’s part of her childhood. Several flashbacks reveal how Jessica was like Alice, so hunkered in her world of imaginary friends that her grip on reality unleashed a horror entity that has waited decades for Jessica. As Wise comes to remember her past and comes to terms with how her father suffered at the hands of these imaginary beings, her performance demonstrates a formidability to fight for her new family; it’s too bad her arc is undercut by just how underdeveloped her childhood is. The same goes for the two young actors. Burns puts up the angsty teenager facade well, and there is a great evolution for Taylor as she develops a sense of sisterhood with Alice. While their relationship lacks scenes of them interacting, Burns is a good enough performer to outshine the script.
Braun keeps up with many of the film’s more difficult moments as she shares most of her scenes with the demonic-possessed teddy bear. Alice initially becomes enamored and connected to her friend. The tasks and behaviors of Chauncey lead her to anguish and frustration, and Braun showcases some amings of what could be a wonderful career for the child star.
Buckley sadly has far less to do other than dump exposition and bore the viewer to tears; she feels tacked on to present some clarity instead of letting the film reveal it on its own. The way Gloria is handled by the end is so contrived and silly that one begs should this film begin with that absurd, idiotic tone, as the change would’ve made far more sense than how she’s directed early on.
The whole film is conflicted. At times it yearns to have some emotional catharsis on childhood traumas and the reclaim of our scars —so much so that Alice has literal burn scars from her mentally ill mom that she has to hide out of shame. Yet the film also wants to be silly and fun, just enough to skirt around its PG-13 rating but not too intense to cross over into genuine horror. It’s misleading to believe this is horror, as it hardly has any real bite or identity in being horrifying.
Imaginary didn’t have to reinvent any wheels, it just simply had to entertain. Yet the film fails at even that, functioning more as a stale exercise in horror tropes and tricks often prevalent in films of this ilk. It’s films like Imaginary that make the genre feel cheap and passionless. Sadly, for every high point — for every Hereditary (2018), Smile (2022), or Pearl (2022) — there comes a descent into the junky trash that capitalizes on its core audience and quickly falls out of the conscious minds. Imaginary may have been born from some imagination, but it’s as disposable and forgettable as most thoughts we have daily.
Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Feature Image Credit to Blumhouse via IMDb
Recent Comments