The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F
I’ll be honest, I’m running out of ways to say the same things about these horrendous PG-13 horror movies. I could just take my review of Night Swim or Five Nights at Freddy’s, change some nouns and repost it and it would essentially be the same thing. Like those films, Imaginary is godawful. It isn’t scary, it contains zero violence or bloodshed, it relies completely on lame jump scares and it seems designed for children. Small, skittish, stupid children.
Our hero is Jessica, a children’s book author, who is having nightmares about her fictional character (a giant spider) trying to kill her. She also had some sort of traumatic event as a child that left her father raving mad in a mental institution. With nightmares and growing anxiety, she does the only logical thing: she returns to the site of her childhood trauma and moves back into her old house. Jessica is now married with two step daughters and the younger daughter starts exhibiting an odd attachment to a teddy bear, who she calls her friend, as soon as they move into the house. With a traumatic history and spooky shenanigans, you bet your ass that they won’t simply move out. We need to stretch this shitshow to 144 minutes.
I will give this movie two advantages over this year’s other horror abomination, Night Swim: the core concept of an evil imaginary friend isn’t bad and it does have a twist that I didn’t see coming. However, in the fright department Imaginary somehow makes Night Swim look like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Some jackass once complained about a review in which I “spoiled” that a horror movie contained no blood or violence. Well, that asshole should prepare to complain again because not a goddamn thing happens in Imaginary. The only death occurs off-screen, so I am only assuming that the person dies. The most visceral thing that occurs on-screen is when someone gets scrapped by a nail. Not stabbed with a nail, mind you, just scrapped by a nail. Thankfully, they were fine because I was pissing myself in terror for a few moments there. The teddy bear could have been creepy if anything was done with it. For the most part, it just sits there looking a bit ominous. When its really feeling spry, it might tilt its head a bit. The teddy bear villain in Toy Story 3 is more intimidating and has a much more compelling backstory than this frigging thing.
What’s fascinating about Imaginary is how genuinely disinterested it seems to be in its own plot. Things just kind of happen with no buildup or payoff. The father character is conveniently removed from the film around the midpoint because he has to go on tour. So I guess he’s a musician of some kind? I don’t know, he’s just gone from the movie. The mother of the kids sneaks into the house one night and attacks Jessica. This incident, and the mother character in general, is never mentioned again. I’m assuming that the mother going nuts is a parallel to Jessica’s dad going nuts, but since there is never a backstory for the mother, I’m left to write this part of the movie in my head on behalf of the screenwriters who couldn’t be bothered. These kinds of movies always have an old person that conveniently is an expert on the specific thing happening in the movie (see also: Night Swim), but this movie takes the cake in this department. The old woman next door, who apparently babysat for Jessica as a kid, is now an expert on imaginary friends. How the fuck do you become an expert on imaginary friends? She even wrote a frigging book about it. She mentions that nobody in the field takes her work seriously. How many other people are studying this? This all comes across as borderline parody, like this was originally meant as a spoof of PG-13 horror movies and nobody got the joke.
In the last act, we finally get to go into the world of imaginary friends and it may seem familiar to anyone around my age (I’m 39). When I was a kid, my favorite cartoon was The Real Ghostbusters. People around my age probably remember the show and, if you remember the show, you probably remember the episodes with the Boogeyman. That big-headed, hoofed bastard was way scarier than anything in this movie (and last year’s The Boogeyman, for that matter). The imaginary world in this movie, which is reached by going through doors that are drawn on the wall just like in Beetlejuice, is filled with gravity-defying staircases that go in every which direction to different doors leading to different kids’ homes. This is lifted directly from the Boogeyman’s world in The Real Ghostbusters but is somehow less frightening than that children’s cartoon from the 80s. There is also an odd moment where our characters encounter an alternate world within the imaginary realm and the scene is lifted straight from Coraline. I’m not sure what I prefer: The first two acts of this movie where absolutely nothing happens or the last act where it is just reminding me of far better things that I could be watching instead.
Blumhouse Productions is really killing it this year with Night Swim and Imaginary, two absolutely abysmal films that represent everything that’s soulless and wrong with modern horror. I will say that Night Swim is the slightly better movie of the two, but that’s like saying my commute to work today was slightly better than yesterday’s commute. Both made me consider driving my car into a concrete divider to put an abrupt end to it, so it’s really a toss-up. If my movie theater had windows, both of these movies would have had me considering taking a leap toward pavement. Enjoy.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(film)#/media/File:Imaginary_2024_film_poster.jpeg
