Blumhouse’s theatrical endeavors have taken somewhat of a nosedive in recent months, with a triple threat of certified stinkers: The Exorcist: Believer, which foolishly assumed it could imitate its historic ancestor; Five Nights at Freddy’s, which was more concerned with empty-calorie fan service than being a movie; and Night Swim, which suffered from a wickedly weak foundation more than anything; all of them seemingly doing all they can to drag the name of a great filmmaking house down.
Imaginary doesn’t suffer for any of the reasons that plagued its production brethren, but unfortunately, it decided to utilize its own imagination to dream up new ways to manifest as an absolute misfire. Okay, so maybe a distressingly weak script and acting that said script frankly deserves aren’t exactly “brand new ways” to gut a movie, but Imaginary also boasts the unique weakness of having picked the wrong genre with which to tell this story. This genre misfire is a testament to both the potential of its premise, and how severely it fails as a horror film.
Imaginary follows Jessica (DeWanda Wise), a children’s book author who’s looking after her two stepdaughters — the teenage Taylor (Taegan Burns) and small child Alice (Pyper Braun) — while their father Max (Tom Payne) is away on a tour. The family have recently moved into Jessica’s childhood house, where Alice discovers an adorable stuffed bear named Chauncey. She bonds with the toy sweetly at first, but when the “games” they play become increasingly hazardous and disturbing, Jessica is forced to confront her past in order to protect her new family.
Now, there’s not a single good performance in sight here (although the young Braun shows an ability to render emotions that’s quite impressive for her age) but not even Dionysus, Greek god of theatre nor any of his disciples would have been able pull off anything engaging in the face of Imaginary‘s excruciatingly poor writing.
And further still, it’s not entirely clear whether such a weakness manifests by way of the script itself, the cutting room, or some combination of the two; on the one hand, the film’s dialogue is industriously flat and unnatural, with the second-greatest offender (we’ll get to the biggest one later) being Betty Buckley’s character, Gloria, who can be most aptly characterized as “Madame Exposition.” But on the other hand, the movement both within and between each scene is just as inorganic, giving the impression that, if the script ever had a grasp on the concept of telling a story with “therefore” rather than “and then” — a crucially important skill to have for this craft — that grasp loosened in its translation to the screen (though it’s also not insincere to assume that the aforementioned dialogue was an isolated flaw).
To the latter point of its jarringly stilted flow, Imaginary doesn’t seem to understand how to be a horror movie, which is different than being a film that isn’t scary. That’s not to say that Imaginary is scary, because it isn’t. Still, horror films are more than capable of being great movies without necessarily being scary (“scary,” of course, has such a mercurial threshold across humanity that it’s pretty fruitless to judge a film based on raw fear factor), but Imaginary, again, is not either of these.
Indeed, anyone familiar with the genre has a shared understanding, whether they’re conscious of it or not, of a certain language that’s effectively native to horror movies; a language that most recognizably takes the form of those second-to-second beats and camera movements that prelude jumpscares and faux jumpscares. The problem with Imaginary is that, while it seems to be aware of this language — at least based on how it frames the meat of its “scary” scenes — the clumsy rush that permeates the whole movie destabilizes that horror language, therefore causing it to fall apart as a horror movie on a mechanical level.
And it’s not any better on a cerebral level, either, especially considering that there’s a wealth of solid-to-excellent ideas one could conceptually pull out of Imaginary. A teddy bear as the main villain? Plenty of space to play around with the real and in-canon psychology built into a symbol of a safe and happy childhood suddenly turning into this malicious presence. An imaginary friend whose violence stems from the pain of abandonment, with a step-mom protagonist trying to win over her stepkids, no less? Go all in on exploring the darker nuances of love; the unrequited breed, the grief (which, by definition, is love that has nowhere to go), the paradox of the fact that real love is given without expecting anything in return, despite all of us needing to be loved, on some level, in order to survive.
Imaginary has vague impressions of that second thread, here and there, but any piece of the plot that even suggests the possibility of an arc or a theme is quickly buried under another round of cumbersome writing before it even has a chance of a chance to take shape, and nothing captures this frustrating faceplant better than the film’s ending (which is the script’s biggest offender that I alluded to earlier). After anti-climactically resolving what appears to be its final tension, the film kicks off a new scene where Jessica is reading her new book to her ill father, only to pull a fast one and effectively repeat the same pseudo-ending we just watched, after which the film actually does end. The thing is — and I’m not just saying this to be grossly hyperbolic; this is straight-faced, dispassionate observation — the ending of that fake children’s book that we only heard the ending of is, thematically, a better ending than the one we got in this movie, and I don’t even know what else to say about that, which is perhaps all that needs to be said anyway.
In closing, Imaginary shouldn’t have rolled the dice on being a horror movie. The sheer amount of lore implied in the world of this film, which does actually pique genuine curiosity, tells me it would have been better suited as a full-blown urban fantasy feature; in that scenario, Imaginary wouldn’t have been burdened by the dark weight that an out-and-out horror movie more or less requires, and so could have thrown itself to the winds of a unique, more upbeat adventure — one whose writing, even if it was just as poor as that of the film we got, at least wouldn’t have been felt as harshly as audiences got sucked away in imaginative reverie.
But Imaginary is, in fact, a horror movie, as well as a dissonant canvas depicting just about everything you shouldn’t do, if you hope to tell a good story. Indeed, considering he had to sit helplessly through roughly two months of that particular filming, I don’t blame Chauncey one bit for being so pissed off.
