Imaginary is a 2024 horror/thriller focusing on a mother and her youngest stepdaughter experiencing increasingly weirder happenings after finding a teddy bear in the basement of their new home.
Paddington would never. Children’s author and illustrator Jess (DeWanda Wise) is ready to start a new chapter in her life with husband, Max (Tom Payne) and his two daughters; rebellious Taylor (Taegan Burns) and the sweet Alice (Pyper Braun). Ironically, this new chapter involves returning to an old locale. Jess and Max have purchased the old home that she grew up in as a child. It’s where she has happy memories…at least the ones she can remember, and she’s looking to make new ones with her new stepchildren.
A simple game of hide and seek brings Alice a new toy. No, a new friend. This friend is Chauncey, the teddy bear found in the basement. At first, Jess sees it as cute and a source of stability for Alice who has experienced her own traumas courtesy of her birth mother. But later, bizarre occurrences point to something else, and these occurrences begin to slowly unearth troubling memories in Jess’ psyche as a whimsical imagination transforms into a shared nightmare.
What happened to Blumhouse Productions? Probably over-romanticizing the earlier days of the company, but it certainly feels as if the earlier days carried better quality flicks. Now, whether its original fare or remade IPs, the studio is the horror/thriller facsimile of the MCU post-Endgame. Once a studio looked at as one consistently putting out solid and buzz-worthy offerings on smaller budgets in tandem with its quantity, Imaginary is another fairly middling and ultimately forgettable entry into the large catalog of Blumhouse.
The best thing about Imaginary? Quality-wise, it is not the terrible Truth or Dare or the foul Fantasy Island, two movies that share a common link (beyond being Blumhouse productions) in director/writer Jeff Wadlow, who seems to have a predilection for stories heavy on some form of hallucinatory happenings. To Wadlow’s credit, he creates two extended standout scenes with notable tension that are earned and not cheap. These two scenes do point to the potential the movie has. Yet for a movie with the name Imaginary with its subjects possibly dealing with make-believe entities, one would expect more willingness to get zany in its environment and designs, particularly in the final act. Instead, what we’re treated to by Wadlow and company are some mirrors and a couple of winding staircases mostly coated in shades of navy and black. It looks like if the sunken place in Get Out and scenes of Escape Room had a baby. Imaginary as a whole shares a similarity with many recent offerings of Blumhouse: Whether remade IP or new stories, they tend to all look the same.
Wadlow had multiple writers in those aforementioned failed films contributing to the screenplay, and he hasn’t quite learned his lesson in Imaginary. Again, a trio of writers are credited, Wadlow being one of them with Jason Oremland and Greg Erb. There’s not enough cohesion with tone, oscillating between attempts at being weighty and a winking self awareness, and likely picking one lane could have improved the overall quality of this feature. I will give credit to a nifty twist halfway through I didn’t see coming. However, threads/characters of the plot are introduced and dropped hastily, or forcibly included to the point where one story reveal can be seen from miles away.
The dialogue does the cast little favors; that said many of the individuals in the cast perform as if they’re in different movies. That’s not to say all performances are subpar—Wise is passable and the youngster Braun drives nearly all of the best moments. But the chemistry among the newly formed family is quite cold. Payne adds nothing, and it comes off as an admission of failure on the part of the screenwriters when they write him out of the latter half of the movie. Veteran Betty Buckley plays the expository role, tasked with world-building dissertation-style in a most clumsy way.
Refusing to parlay its illusory setup into a creative offering, Imaginary holds viewing intrigue sporadically but never manifests into a distinctly satisfying reality. It’s a bearable watch, albeit just bearly.