REVIEW: ‘Imaginary’ has insufficient scares

Blumhouse Productions, the gift that keeps on giving. Sometimes you get something fun like “M3gan,” other times you get “Imaginary.”

The latest film from the horror-centric studio centers on Jessica (DeWanda Wise), an accomplished children’s book author. The film picks up with her and her husband (Tom Payne), as well as her step-children Alice (Pyper Braun) and Taylor (Taegen Burns) moving into her childhood home.

Taylor isn’t a fan at all of her stepmom but Alice seems to be OK and starts adjusting to the new house thanks to a teddy bear she finds in the basement. However, it soon becomes clear that the bear is attached to a dark spirit related to Jessica’s own past.

This film may be all about imagination but it’s not a very imaginative project. The movie is really just another horror where a simple object is tied to some paranormal entity, and it causes some mayhem for either a group of teens or a family.

There have been a lot of these flicks over the years with some random thing being haunted, many of them coming with a PG-13 rating. Such films include 2018’s “Truth or Dare” with a haunted game, 2019’s “Countdown” that had a possessed app, and from earlier this year, “Night Swim” with a ghostly pool.

A lot of these pictures may have different plot structures but usually boil down to the same tropes playing out over a runtime of around an hour and 40 minutes. They also usually have similar creative teams. “Truth or Dare” and “Night Swim” both came from Blumhouse, and the former was helmed by the director of this movie, Jeff Wadlow.

So, this time around, the haunted thing is the bear that the stepdaughter Alice takes a liking to. The only real difference is that instead of a demon or ghost, it’s an entity from a character’s own imagination. However, it may have well just been your average evil spirit, because it acts just like one.

It’s a lot of the same stuff that’s been included with these types of movies before. The entity in question interacts with the characters in small ways that are mysterious but mostly ignorable, and they get worse as time goes on to the point where they are threatening and something must be done.

It’s rather disappointing because having the horror directly tied to someone’s imagination could lead to some inventive scares and potential solutions for dealing with the problem. The old “Nightmare on Elm Street” series had some pretty good examples of what’s possible. “Imaginary,” meanwhile, feels like it’s just going through the motions of 2010s haunted horror.

There’s a build-up of jump scares with little payoff until the final 20 minutes or so where the spirit is fully revealed, and it’s not really worth the wait. There’s little in terms of strong scary moments or intrigue related to the dark imaginary world that comes about. Much of it is just underwhelming.

“Imaginary” feels like the latest on a horror production line. There’ve been worse films to come off that line, “Night Swim,” the most recent example. Even so, “Imaginary” is a film lacking in style, with writing and attempts at horror falling flat. To the movie’s credit, the cast didn’t seem to be phoning it in here, and the premise is a bit better than others. Still, this one is skippable. 2 out of 5.

Author: Matthew Liedke

Journalist and film critic in Minnesota. Graduate of Rainy River College and Minnesota State University in Moorhead. Outside of movies I also enjoy sports, craft beers and the occasional video game. View all posts by Matthew Liedke