‘Imaginary’ Review: Blumhouse’s Latest Friend is All too Ordinary

A broken family struggling to accept a new, also broken member. A vaguely creepy old toy. An old house that creaks regularly. A forgotten past. A soundtrack filled with whispers. A mysterious older lady with insight into the supernatural. Nearly every element of Imaginary, the latest PG-13 hopeful horror hit from Blumhouse, has been handed down from other films. This is, of course, by design. While the film was directed by Jeff Wadlow and co-written by Wadlow, Greg Erb, and Jason Oremland, the real auteur here is production company honcho Jason Blum. Blum has been one of the most successful producers in recent years, churning out low-to-mid-budget horror films with clockwork regularity. The studio made its name off critically acclaimed box office successes like Paranormal Activity, Whiplash, and Get Out, but its failures are perhaps more numerous: Truth Or Dare, Fantasy Island, Firestarter, The Lazarus Effect, and on and on. While the studio has made its fair share of sequels – franchises The Purge and Paranormal Activity were birthed and nurtured here – Imaginary feels like an attempt to recreate the start of a franchise that didn’t start in the house of Blum: James Wan’s Insidious.

Imaginary follows the Insidious template to a tee. A family moves into a new house – in this case, father Max (Tom Payne) is moving his two girls, Taylor (Taegen Burns) and Alice (Pyper Braun), to the childhood home of his new wife Jessica (DeWanda Wise). The girl’s mother (Alix Angelis) had some sort of mental break, leaving Alice with terrible scarring on her arm. Jessica only wants to be a good stepmother to the girls, as her father suffered a similar break when she was a child. When Alice finds an old stuffed bear in the basement of her new home, she starts talking to it like an imaginary friend and goes on a scavenger hunt for items it suggests. Things start innocently enough, with Alice asking for a piece of paper or something happy, but she says Chauncey (the bear’s name) doesn’t want anyone else to see the list, and the more items Alice collects, the more dangerous the tasks become. When Jessica catches Alice trying to hurt herself with a rusty nail, she calls the girl’s psychologist, who discovers that Alice’s imaginary friend might not be so imaginary after all and may even have a connection to Jessica herself. Now, Jessica has to face her deepest fears and repressed memories if she wants to save Alice from Chauncey. 

The idea of a malevolent spirit posing as a child’s imaginary friend in the body of an old stuffed bear is just ridiculous enough for audiences to expect something slightly campy. Imaginary is in on the joke, at least a bit, but unlike films like Child’s Play or M3GAN, it never leads with humor, nor does it ever try to make Chauncey the lead character. But the film’s PG-13 rating renders it toothless on the horror front, with Wadlow aping the tension-filled pan-and-scare technique Wan perfected in The Conjuring for nearly every single one of the film’s attempts at jump scares. Instead of making the film scary, this technique makes it fun, signaling to the audience that something scary is going to happen at the exact second you think it will. Being fun is certainly a noble goal for a PG-13 film to shoot for, but even children’s horror films have more genuine frights in store for their intended audience than this. Insidious may have had that rating as well, but that film had an almost oppressively spooky atmosphere that aided its numerous shocking, successful scares. Imaginary, on the other hand, contents itself with sticking to tried-and-true formulas wherever it can, to its detriment as a piece of horror cinema.

The one place where the film does latch onto some actual horror is in the fantastically creepy-crawly creature design. A faceless figure creepily blends in with the background of several scenes, and Chauncey’s full form is a terrifically tactile, monstrously deformed, bear-like thing that genuinely feels like the monster you imagined under your bed as a kid. We finally see this in the film’s last act, which significantly raises the stakes in several ways. When described, the premise of the finale sounds bonkers, but it doesn’t actually play that way. Given the influences Wadlow and crew have shamelessly exploited throughout, it’s not difficult to figure out where the film will go and once it gets there, it leaves a lot to be desired. The screenplay has some wild ideas, and Wadlow and the production design team come up with some fun visuals, but no one involved had the guts to follow through on the wildness of the concept. Instead of leaning in and giving the audience something that would be genuinely trippy and new, the screenplay barely scratches the surface of its own idea, settling for a straightforward horror-fantasy final boss battle that works on the level of character and theme but feels like a let-down for how utterly standard it is.

Such is the ultimate failure of Imaginary: For a film about imagination, it doesn’t have nearly enough of its own. Thankfully, it does have other things that make it worth watching. Wise builds a believable rapport with Burns and Braun, the latter of whom gives an outstanding performance that never tips too far into child actor cliché. Jessica is also one of the more intelligent, resourceful horror heroines in recent memory, with Wise giving her a strong core of decency even as she’s pushed to the end of her rope. The dialogue she’s saddled with can’t be helped, although not many actors could put over this film’s most ridiculous lines. While laid on a bit thick, the film’s ultimate message about love and family does shine through because of the performances. The aforementioned jump scare moments may not be scary, but they do have a sense of fun to them. When combined with the occasional glimpses of campiness, it’s almost enough to trick you into thinking the film is better than it actually is. Don’t fall for it. Imaginary may be enjoyable, but that doesn’t mean it’s great.

Grade: C+

Lionsgate will release Imaginary only in theaters on March 8.