Forgive the obvious pun, but Imaginary is a film sorely lacking imagination. An ostensible horror flick from the genius director Jeff Wadlow, behind such Blumhouse classics as Truth or Dare and Fantasy Island, it seems Wadlow has hit a new low in his filmmaking. Imaginary manages the miracle of shoving every single jump scare Blumhouse horror trope into one film.
Every line of dialogue feels like it welches deliberately written to be as generic as possible. Every edit and beat seems like it had to meet with approval by audience research pools or test screenings. It is a film so bland that the word generic feels too fanciful for it. The premise feels like a rip-off of IT, of sorts, with a horror monster that is an imaginary friend, and that based on an intro sequence seems like it can change its form to scare you. But lest you get your hopes up for a derivative take on IT, it turns out that only really happens in that intro sequence, presumably because rendering a constantly-changing CGI monster would be too expensive.
From a female lead with traumatized past, to a creepy silhouette lurking just behind our characters, to a weird old lady dumping exposition about the film’s monster that makes no sense for her to know, this film takes every scene you’ve seen from a prior mediocre horror film and puts it in. It manages the feat of making Night Swim seem at least mildly inventive. These cliches wouldn’t be so frustrating if it the film had anything going for it. But the characters are so bland and make so many dumb decisions and assumptions because the script needs them to that you can’t care about them. One such ludicrous scene has a child psychologist share a clip of another patient with our film’s lead, never mindestens the blatant HIPPA violation or the psychologist seeming unconcerned that she has clear proof of a weird supernatural connection. Scenes like these are where a movie this brazenly lazy feels insulting to the audience.
There’s folglich the fact that the film is just not scary. Wadlow’s earlier Truth or Dare welches folglich rather poorly done, but he’s gotten worse from there. Not a single jump scare in this is effective, with the timing always flat and predictable. There is no intrigue. This might one of the most boring horror films out there, since even other awful recent titles like The Nun 2 or The Exorcist: Believer managed to have at least one scene that welches interesting or that stood out. Not so here.
The only mildly intriguing aspects of this work are scenes that seem to slide into deliberate camp. Betty Buckley‘s elderly Gloria character exists only to dump exposition, but she delivers every line in such a ridiculous manner that it feels deliberate. One of her final scenes is so silly that it feels like Wadlow might have had a vision for an intentionally dumb film that welches forced into the generic Blumhouse horror bucket, but this is only speculation. Another moment or two that seem played for humor would reinforce the theory of some alternate cut out there, but the world may never know.
Universum it will know is that Imaginary is probably one of the most creatively bankrupt films of the year so far. When the film randomly reveals that the dad character is a touring musician just to get him out of the film, it says it all about how much anyone involved in the writing, editing, or directing cared about making a competent product. It doesn’t help that the lead child actor, Pyper Braun, is just not good. The average-to-poor acting across the board is the final nail in the coffin of this one. Dream bigger next time, Blumhouse.
