Director – Jeff Wadlow (The Curse of Bridge Hollow, Truth or Dare?)
Starring – DeWanda Wise (Jurassic World Dominion, The Twilight Zone), Taegen Bums (Monarch, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changer), and Pyper Braun (Superkitties, Erin and Aaron)
Release Date -2024
Rating – 2/5
When it comes to modern horror there are very few production companies as successful as Jason Blum and his Blumhouse Productions. Films like Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Get Out, M3gan, and Five Nights at Freddy’s. While I do like some of their films, I wouldn’t call myself a fan of theirs. The Blumhouse films that I do like are films that I absolutely love. However, I can count on the one hand how many of their films I do like. The rest are pretty horror by numbers and boring to me.
I don’t deny their impact on the horror genre but most of their films are not for me. Sometime back I started receiving press releases for the Blumhouse produced Imaginary from Lionsgate Films. The trailer didn’t get me excited for it, but the marketing and synopsis did pique my interest. A few weeks ago, I was sent over a screener link for the film and decided to check it out.
**Spoiler Alert** The film follows a young woman, her new husband, and two stepdaughters as they move into her old childhood home. She was forced to leave as a kid and was not allowed to come back. However, after her father was placed in an assisted living facility, she is able to finally move back into her home. Once they are all settled in, her youngest daughter announces that she has become friends with an imaginary friend Chauncy. This starts out innocently enough but over time things get more and more strange. Eventually she learns that an evil entity is pretending to be her imaginary friend to lure her back into his home revealing why she was forced to leave her home and father at such a young age. **Spoiler Alert**
As I stated before, the trailer for Imaginary did not really sell me on the film. The marketing and synopsis did make me a little curious about the film, but I should have stuck with my initial gut feeling after watching the trailer. Imaginary is one of those horror films that has so much potential but is unable to pull it all together to give viewers something memorable.
The acting in this one is one of the few aspects of the film that I actually enjoyed. DeWanda Wise and Taegen Burns made the film for me. I love their character dynamics and how they interact with each other. With that being said, I didn’t necessarily care for the remainder of the cast nor the characters they portrayed.
The story for this one left so many questions unanswered and was extremely predictable. The overall flick felt like it was created in one big brainstorming session. The characters, aside from the stepmother and her oldest daughter, feel like generic movie characters that offer up very little to the story. You already know the older woman is evil from the moment you see her, so the reveal is predictable, the monster after the mother and not the child is predictable, and everyone escaping the creature is also predictable considering the film’s rating.
Finally, this one doesn’t have any blood and gore along with some not so impressive visual effects. I loved the look of the set in the creature’s lair but that is the only thing that was visually appealing about the film. Overall, Imaginary is another forgettable flick with Blumhouse attached. It’s painfully predictable, unlikable characters, and a goofy creature. This is one I would highly recommend skipping.
