“Imaginary” is a boring disaster of a horror film

It’s hard to know where to start when describing how bad it is Imaginary Is. The new horror film from Blumhouse and director Jeff Wadlow (Kick Ass 2) begins with the simple but promising premise of a haunted stuffed animal and a malevolent imaginary friend, but its dull characters, fuzzy narrative, and lack of scares leave a film that’s lifeless than a teddy bear without stuffing.

ImaginaryThe muddled story begins with a woman named Jessica (She must have it And Jurassic world domination(DeWanda Wise) and her new husband Max (Tom Payne) awaken after one of Jessica’s recurring nightmares. She is chased down a long hallway by a giant spider, which also happens to be the main villain in the children’s books she writes. The couple quickly decide that it is time for her and Max’s two children from a previous marriage, teenager Taylor (Taegen Burns) and the much younger Alice (Pyper Braun), to move into Jessica’s parents’ house in hopes that the familiar surroundings will cure her of her nightmares. Max’s children aren’t too happy about the move, although it’s not entirely clear how far they’re going or what their specific objections are.

It’s not really clear whether we’re supposed to believe that Jessica wants to get along with her new stepdaughters, or whether her rudeness towards them is an accidental problem of the script and acting. Anyway, after a few days in the house, Jessica ignores Alice by sneaking out of the house during a game of hide-and-seek to answer a work call, leaving Alice behind to explore the basement and find Chauncey the creepy teddy bear.

Chauncey quickly becomes Alice’s new imaginary friend, who she talks to constantly and takes with her everywhere. This part of the plot is powerfully evocative M3GAN, without ever even coming close to the entertaining spirit of this film. This entire setup happens about 10 minutes into the film, and this is also where the coherent plot details end.

[Ed. note: The rest of this story contains significant spoilers for Imaginary. The good news is, reading about them is much more fun than sitting through all 104 minutes of the movie.]

Chauncey’s arrival was also intended to provide eeriness Imaginary, but the film gets so distracted by trying to piece together a story out of its myriad meaningless plot threads that it doesn’t have much time to devote to the actual horror. For example, in one scene, the children’s birth mother shows up at Jessica’s house without warning, attacks Jessica, reveals that she seems to have a psychic knowledge that there is something evil in the house, is arrested, and then disappears for the entire rest of the film. This scene will never be brought up again.

Shortly afterwards, Max simply leaves his children behind with their new, clearly unsuitable stepmother so that he can go on tour with his band for a seemingly indefinite period of time. There’s also a creepy neighbor who happens to have a fully illustrated academic textbook about imaginary friends that seems tailor-made for a laid-back exhibition scene. The film even throws in two separate child abuse storylines, which it eventually just ignores when they’re no longer useful.

It’s tempting to read into this labyrinth of digressions to find some meaning or intent, but Imaginary It never feels like it’s worth it. There isn’t a single character in the film worth rooting for, and the performances are completely charismatic. The script, written by Wadlow, Jason Oremland and Greg Erb, is full of wooden dialogue that is stiff and often seems almost completely nonsensical. Characters sometimes introduce new information as if it’s a fact the audience has known forever.

At other times, they treat seemingly obvious plot points like big, unpredictable reveals—like when we find out that Chauncey once belonged to Jessica. None of these storylines ever add up to much, and most of them are just left hanging by the end of the film. If filmmakers don’t care about them, why should we?

But like any horror film, most of this disaster could be overlooked if only the story were scary. Instead, this is where the errors become most clearly visible. Imaginary doesn’t bring a single original idea to the horror genre. It’s entirely paint-by-numbers filmmaking that never manages to create suspense, let alone fear. The characters peek under the beds as the cheesy score creates a barrage of strings that beg us to feel something. Chauncey moves on his own once or twice and even transforms into a monstrous bear, but the scenes are so poorly lit that the effect seems cheap and half-baked rather than remotely frightening. Watching sequences like this is jarring for a horror fan, and the moments where the film slows down to deliver the next scare feel like they drag on forever.

The only briefly interesting sequence comes in the last third of the film, when Alice is tricked into visiting the world of imaginary friends and Jessica and Taylor must save her. This world floats in darkness and its only solid ground is a checkerboard floor in an endless corridor full of doors. Parts of the world form stairs to nowhere, dead ends that lead to an abyss, and doors that seem to float upside down.

None of these images are entirely original – they aim for the middle ground in between Twin Peaks‘ red room and a Scooby Doo Chase scene, without the fun that this combination brings. But even without any originality, it is by far the best image in the film. Unfortunately, most of the time in this world, the characters just blindly run through doors and end up in the same boring rooms we saw in the rest of the film, each one shot essentially the same as in the real world, just a little darker.

Imaginary I didn’t have a high bar to overcome. In a year that has so far been lacking in interesting horror films with the other Blumhouse entry Night swimming The only real bright spot for this film was to be just goofy fun with a few good scares. Instead, it gets lost in a maze of terrible stories and frustrating characters without offering anything more than the standard horror tropes that have been better executed in a million other films.

Imaginary hits theaters March 8th.