PREMISE
A woman returns to her childhood home to discover that the imaginary friend she left behind is very real and unhappy that she abandoned him.
THE GOOD STUFF
Good? Good stuff, you say?
DeWanda Wise (I guess)…
Follow me here…
Back in 2021 there was an NBA playoff game between the Portland Trail Blazers and the Denver Nuggets. A game that Portland lost in double overtime. They lost that game because their team sucked. Everybody on that team sucked except for one lone guy. That guy’s name was Damian Lillard. He had nearly half of their points as a team and he hit every impossible basketball shot he possibly could to keep them within that game but they lost anyway. The team sucked way too much for him to bring them to victory.
Why do I bring that up? Because DeWanda Wise is very much Damian Lillard in this particular scenario. There is absolutely positively nothing else remotely good about this film except for her. She is trying her hardest to take this carbon copy supernatural horror story (that we’ve all seen a thousand times by this point) and absolutely atrocious on-the-nose dialogue and give it some gravitas. Wise is truly ice skating uphill however, and despite her efforts… it is all for nothing.
THE BAD STUFF
THE YOUNGSTER– I find it to be flat out mean to be overtly critical of a child actor’s performance in a film in a film that would be bad even if their performance is good. However, the emotional center of this movie is a child character and sometimes that really hinders everything.
Sometimes in these supernatural horror movies, there’s just too much depending on child performances. And sometimes these kids are overacting. I’ll be fair, it’s a 50/50 split at this point. There are movies with wonderful child performances, movies like the black phone, the sixth sense, and Ghostbusters Afterlife… And on the other hand, there are movies like this and many others.
THE UGLY STUFF
Creature effects– It is in no way telling you a spoiler that there is a creature in this particular movie, and I have to admit that the creature looks and feels like a very twisted Jim Henson animatronic suit of the early 1990s and I say that in an endearing way.
But then…because we can’t have nice things which movie has to go and use this creature in the final act in a way that made me roll my eyes so hard I thought they were just going to get stuck up there and I was just going to have white eyeballs for the rest of my life.
THE DIALOGUE– There are multiple cringey-on-the-nose dialogue character monologues sprinkled throughout this film and it is a test of one’s endurance. I think the audience would have gotten the idea for the motivation of the villain, the backstory of the main character, and the main character’s relationship with all the side characters of this film…just by what is already being shown on screen. But this film goes above and beyond to give you monologues that thoroughly explain every motivation, and thought of a character in a very unnatural way.
THE FINAL SET PIECE– As with many Blumhouse movies, it is the area in which a final showdown takes place that serves as the section of the movie where one can guess exactly where the lion’s share of the budget went. And this is a 10 million dollar budget here. So one can assume there was an impressive set piece to close this puppy out right?
Look, I can throw a significant amount of shade to the third act entirely and everything that leads up to us going into this final set piece, but the film takes such a sharper decline from what the film had been up until that point when we get to the final set piece.
Character motivations change so drastically from what they’ve been up until that point in the film that one comes to think that this is part of the film where the rewrites might have taken place or things might have been subtracted. Certain things make no sense but because we’re so deep in the film we just kind of have to… accept it I guess?
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This is not one of those horror movies that you sit back and laugh at because it’s being done in a tongue-in-cheek manner. This has a way different feeling, and a way different kind of heaviness to it and that makes it all the more worse.
Here we are not even three whole goddamn months into the year of 2024 and there are not one but TWO bonafide entries into the top 10 worst of the year list no matter what the hell else comes out this year. That this has a theatrical release and didn’t go straight to Redbox is a mystery. Â
IMAGINARY is (somehow) in theaters now.
