The imagination of a child is fertile ground for horror as there seems to be no limit to the depths of the unspeakable terrors they convince themselves are lurking under their bed or in their closets. Similarly, there’s always been something primal about the creepy thought that your child has an imaginary friend that only they can see or hear and that this non-existent companion may be a conduit to some dangerously intrusive thoughts.
It’s with this in mind, that the ever-busy Blumhouse Studios have presented us with Imaginary, their second horror thriller in as many months that continues to try and leech scares from the idea of a malevolent teddy bear after the decidedly uneven Five Nights At Feddy’s.
Can Kick-Ass 2 and Fantasy Island’s Jeff Wadlow manage to dream up a new frightener that captures the imagination?
Successful children’s author Jessica trying hard to be an attentive stepmother to Taylor and Alice, the daughters of her musician husband, Max; and after suffering a difficult childhood of her own, she is adamant that she helps the girls learn to cope with their mentally ill birth mother.
Moving back to Jessica’s childhood home has meant that tensions have continued to rise, but after the younger Alice discovers a teddy bear in the basement, she soon develops an imaginary friend she names Chauncey to help her process her trauma. Nothing particularly wrong with that, except that Jessica soon notices that the fun little scavenger hunt “Chauncey” has her on has some sinister entries such as “Do something that scares you” and Do something that hurts you”.
When the totally useless Max has to go away on tour, Jessica is left to look after the still hostile Taylor and the Chauncey-obsessed Alice, but after things start to degrade to the point of disaster, Jessica calls in a child psychologist that causes a terrible penny to drop.
It seems that when Jessica was five, she had an imaginary friend of her own and in an unbelievable coincidence, it turns out to be the same Chauncey that’s influencing Alice now and matters suddenly take on a supernatural hue. It seems that imaginary friends are real and usually gain strength benevolently from the boundless creativity that children provide, but Chauncey was separated from Jessica when she was five, the fantasy creature became righteously pissed that its meal ticket had been taken away from it. Chauncey hopes to steal Alice away to a fantasy realm known as the Never Ever the same way he tried to take Jessica, but if the penalty of defying the malevolent teddy bear means either getting mauled to death or losing your mind, what hope does Jessica have?
For a film titled Imaginary, Blumhouse’s latest offering sure seems to suffer from the most ironic of issues: lacking any real imagination of it’s own. I mean, it certainly takes its story to some extreme places, but the problem is that in some form or another, you’ve already seen it all before and done significantly better too. Straight off the bat, the movie tries to siphon off memorable moments from other killer toy movies such as Annabelle, M3GAN and, in particular, Child’s Play – in fact, the parallels between Chauncey and Chucky are the most obvious as young Alice (a impressively effective Pyper Braun) is gradually corrupted by an evil force who disguises its nefarious deeds as quaint children’s games. Hell, there’s even a defiant “This is the end, friend” moment when the young heroine finally gets wise to Chauncey’s bullshit, but by then, Imaginary has already moved on to copy from the homework from various ghost movies during its admirably far-out climax.
However, having the leads travel over into another, overworldly realm in order to rescue an abducted child also feels like a straight photocopy of other films like any one of the four Poltergeist movies or Blumhouse’s own Insidious and the Never Ever isn’t that different from the Other Side or the Further to disguise the lack of original ideas. At times I was think that maybe it was my fault as I’ve watched so many genre movies, but as scene after scene passed by that strongly reminded me other films such as the 2018 Halloween (a sudden villainous turn from an expert), Five Nights At Freddy’s (hulking bear monsters), Coraline (button eyed duplicates) and even Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey.
However, not all the issues are plot related as Imaginary is populated by some inconsistent characterizations and some plain bad plotting. While DeWanda Wise was a legitimate stand out in Jurassic World: Dominion, her painfully vanilla heroine is disappointingly bland despite being saddled with the kind of tragic backstory that would fucking kill on a reality TV talent show. Elsewhere, while the more interesting performances tend to come from the younger members of the cast, there’s no real explanation to why Taegan Burns’ rebellious Taylor suddenly turns into a quip-machine during the climax which frequently upends the mood. However, the worse character is a toss up between Tom Payne’s drippy husband and Betty Buckley’s nosey neighbour who may end up being the laziest written role of the year as she suddenly becomes an expert in all things Never Ever and thus delivers painstakingly unsubtle exposition that pours from her larynx in an uncontrollable stream of verbal diarrhoea.
It’s not all bad. Director Wadlow manages to steer a visual interesting ship that contains some legitimately interesting creature designs (the feral, very toothy monster form of Chauncey is genuinely cool), but critically muddled everything up with some horribly telegraphed jump scares that have been done to death. By the time you get to the end credits, you’ll be confused about who Imaginary was supposed to be aimed at. If it was either nastier and contain more innovative scares, or more family oriented and adventure based, then the film would probably have more of a point, but as it stands, its frustrating, middle-of-the-road, try-and-please-everyone approach may work if you’d never seen a horror film before, but for the rest of us it proves to contain as much imagination as a prolonged period of writers block.
The main difference between a teddy bear and the real thing is that the cuddly toy version lacks any real teeth – which is exactly the problem that plagues Imaginary.
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