Film Review: IMAGINARY (2024)

IMAGINARY ** USA 2024 Dir: Jeff Wadlow. 104 mins

For a movie titled Imaginary, the end product is unimaginatively dull.

Blumhouse Productions has been going through a creative rut since last year (The Exorcist: Believer, Insidious: The Red Door, Five Nights At Freddy’s among others) and one of the horror titan’s earliest 2024 releases doesn’t break the curse either.

Considering this is a horror fixated with imaginary friends, christening the movie Imaginary seems a little on the nose. Director Jeff Wadlow also hasn’t had the most impressive CV with his name attached to painfully mediocre horrors experiments like Truth or Dare and Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island.

While it’s unfair judging a movie from only the optics, Imaginary unfortunately doesn’t subvert any pre-conceived suspicions. Borrowing a stylistic nod from here and there, Imaginary is a fairly straightforward parent-protects-child tale with a dash of The Poltergeist, Coraline, Insidious, and I can go on…

The parent, in this case, is children’s author Jessica who returns to her childhood home to get over past traumas. But when her youngest daughter Alice befriends a teddy bear and gets chatty with the stuffed toy day and night, Jessica knows that Alice’s imaginary friend has overstayed his welcome.

Wadlow does try his best to not directly venture into any laughable jump scares (thankfully we don’t see the Teddy floating in thin air) but the hammy acting, cringe-inducing dialogues, and the anticlimactic camera pans can get on your nerves.

DeWanda Wise who was a joy to watch in Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It reboot is stuck with a dull stereotype of a horror mother as Jessica. It’s only a shame that newcomer Pyper Braun is somewhat more creepily convincing than Wise, playing her daughter Alice.

And if you are concerned that this mother-daughter duo is succumbing to cliches, the supporting ensemble also includes a grey-haired, occult-obsessed neighbour (who surprisingly doesn’t live with her cats), Jessica’s rebellious teen of an elder daughter, and a therapist whose only job is exposition.

Towards the third act, Imaginary does pick up pace with an Insidious-style journey to the dark side but the scares are so lazy and the real/imaginary world binary so convoluted that you rarely empathise with Jessica or her childhood trauma that got her into this mess.

Some of Blumhouse’s recent duds still make for an enjoyable guilty pleasure. Last year’s time-traveling slasher Totally Killer and Wadlow’s own Truth or Dare might qualify for this category. But Imaginary, sadly, is a snoozefest that feels as original as its poster’s promo line “Welcome to a fear before imagination”.

Review by Shaurya Thapa

IMAGINARY is out now in cinemas

IMAGINARY is available to rent/buy on Amazon Prime Video in the USA

IMAGINARY will be released on Blu-ray and DVD in the USA on 14th May 2024