Imaginary
Horror director Jeff Wadlow reaches a new low with his hackneyed, poorly realised and scare-free time-waster.
Stuffed: Chauncey and Pyper Braun
There are many things in this world that scare many people: great white sharks, disfigured bogeymen, screaming spectres, abruptly emptied bank accounts… But a teddy bear? Even so, Jeff Wadlow’s spectacularly silly horror film goes to considerable lengths to muster up some scares, albeit with a very limited arsenal of effects. Sadly, the film’s first cliché is to open the proceedings with a jump scare, which turns out to be the figment of a nightmare. It was just a bad dream! The jump scare is to horror films what the exclamation mark is to literature (sorry!). It is the same act of treason as a comedian laughing at his own jokes. The second – or third – cliché, is the set-up: a family moves to a new house. New houses contain no end of spooky potential, although our protagonist, Jessica (DeWanda Wise), once used to live there as a child – and thereby hangs our story…
And then there’s the antagonist – a fairly traditional, innocuous-looking stuffed bear. The young, unintelligible Alice (Pyper Braun, an unlikely future star) discovers the toy in a basement cupboard and immediately turns it around to locate its pull-cord. Obviously, Alice had already seen the script and knew that the bear had a cord, as few teddy bears come with such an accessory. And so Alice adopts the bear as her imaginary friend, names it Chauncey and enters a happy wonderland of her own conception. Reassuringly, her father, Max (Tom Payne), explains that, “everybody had an imaginary friend. I had an imaginary friend who could make a bomb out of anything.” And, as things start to take a turn for the worse, we discover the backstory of a young boy who had an imaginary friend called Randy Rabbit, an unfortunate monicker to say the least. And Randy Rabbit made him cut off his finger…
The director Jeff Wadlow does not have a great track record with horror (cf. Truth or Dare, Fantasy Island), but he knows his way around a low budget. Chauncey does little but stare blankly at the camera, while the modest cast will not have been much more expensive. The trouble with Wadlow is that he’s unafraid of a cliché, be it the familiar strings and beats on the soundtrack, the endless jump scares or the threadbare material (a variation of Dark Water (2005), Hide and Seek (2005) and The Orphanage (2007), etc).
All this adds up to a very tiresome 104 minutes, augmented by poor lighting, below-par acting and muddy storytelling. It’s really a balancing act of improbability, predictable set-ups and laughable leaps of logic (such as, at one point, the shockingly speedy appearance of a fire truck). In the pantheon of ludicrous horror films, Imaginary gets pretty close to the lowest rung.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: DeWanda Wise, Tom Payne, Taegen Burns, Pyper Braun, Matthew Sato, Veronica Falcón, Betty Buckley, Samuel Salary, Alix Angelis.
Dir Jeff Wadlow, Pro Jeff Wadlow and Jason Blum, Screenplay Jeff Wadlow, Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, Ph James McMillan, Pro Des Meghan C. Rogers, Ed Sean Albertson, Music Sparks & Shadows/Bear McCreary, Costumes Eulyn Colette Hufkie, Sound Grant Elder.
Blumhouse Productions/Tower of Babble-Lionsgate UK.
104 mins. USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 8 March 2024. Cert. 15.
