Tim Burton has a lot to answer for. What was once so startlingly original in his early films soon became a lazy visual shorthand to communicate “weird”. It is used to be lazy filmmakers would lift from Dali or Escher before Burton become the default.
The dreamworld in which the big finale of 2024 Imaginary takes place is about 90% Burton and 10% Escher. Odd how a film with this title is so lacking in imagination.
This tired assortment of horror cliches concerns demons from another dimension that pose as childhood imaginary friends. One is tormenting young Pyper Braun, the step-daughter of DeWanda Wise, who has long forgotten her own nearly fatal experience with a similar being in her youth. Wise has, um, unwisely moved her newly formed family into the childhood home where that tragedy happened to her, an event that took the life of the mother and the mind of her father (Samuel Salary).
I’ll get to the other family members in a moment, but I first want to address the teddy bear in the room; or, to put it better, the teddy bear that’s not in the room. I was genuinely confused by this film’s title for about the first half of its runtime, as the evil spirit is a teddy bear Braun finds behind a box in the basement. Isn’t it amazing how, only in horror films, kids willingly go into the darkest recesses of the scariest parts of a house (usually the basement or attic) and find a toy there they come to love dearly?
What is preposterous is a mid-film twist where we discover Chauncy, as Braun dubs the bear, can only be seen by her and Wise. This revelation changes the plot in no way whatsoever, and I’m pretty sure even other characters react to the bear in a way that would only makes sense if they could see him. I am not going to watch this feature a second time to see if I’m correct about that. But the “Chauncy isn’t real” moment is presented as something supposedly so startling that it’s like the teddy bear was supposed to be Keyser Soze or something.
Now that I have that out of the way, let’s address the remaining family members. The other, older step-daughter is played by Taegen Burns. This character is only here to initially fight with Wise, then later share a traumatic experience through which they find the common ground to become friends. It is boilerplate characters like this that make me think that, if Hollywood writers feel so threatened by AI, then maybe they should step up their game now.
I don’t know why I even bother mentioning Tom Payne, as the father of the girls and Wise’s new husband. He will barely be in the film before going on tour with his band.
I was wondering how a musician in this age and Wise, as a children’s book author, could afford the large-ass house they’re in, even if it was her childhood home. Since Salary, as her father, has been institutionalized since the incident in her early years, I can’t imagine the house stayed within the family. If nothing else, the expense of his care would seemingly rule out home ownership of any kind for his daughter nowadays.
Her books are another curious aspect of this film, as its main characters are a millipede and a giant spider that is always menacing her. I’ll just wait here while we all try to think of any children’s books that feature as a recurring character a giant, menacing spider.
I’m not sure if the acting in this is bad, but it is unusual. Often, the individual performances seem to be adequate, except it rarely feels like any two actors are in the same scene and interacting with each other. Instead, it’s more like each person only acts at the other person in the room, a phenomena I found very odd and which I cannot recall a precedent for. It’s almost like each person was filmed separately using greenscreen technology and then edited together into the same space. Maybe half the characters are imaginary friends of the other half. I don’t know.
Things start out innocuous enough for Braun and her (as is eventually revealed) imaginary teddy bear. There are things like a tea party for the two which Wise eavesdrops on. In this scene there appears to be yet another imaginary/supernatural being there, but it turns out Payne’s crazy ex-wife has broken in, making her a deus ex ex-wife machina.
Soon, things are escalating to the point where Wise intervenes at the last possible moment before Braun is going to drive a rusty nail through her hand. This was yet another step in a ritual that will eventually open a door to Tim-Burton-rip-off-land. I was confused as to why anybody would go to so much trouble to basically open a gateway to Hell, in much the same way I have been confounded by the great extends characters went to in other films so they could pal around with Satan. The steps of the ritual are presented to Braun as if this is a scavenger hunt. Another big reveal I found deeply stupid in this film is how long it takes Wise to realize the checklist Braun has been working from is double-sided. Seriously, we’re in the third act before she thinks to turn the piece of paper over.
Almost every aspect of this reeks of a contemporary major studio horror film where not a single person behind the scenes gave a rat’s ass how this turned out. Another character the screenplay template drops in is the “possibly crazy, but knows stuff, old lady next door” who serves as an exposition dump, and may be duplicitous. There’s a child’s notebook filled with more drawings of evil cartoon bears than the entire catalog of Radiohead album cover art. There’s the writing Wise, as a child, put at least partly on seemingly every wall of the house and, in some rooms, every square inch of wall space, and this has simply been left there all this time.
Most films of this type are simply pedestrian, but Imaginary manages to at least be memorably bad. I didn’t believe one second of its plot, the acting has a bizarre and artificial quality to it, and the dialogue ranges from content that could be auto-generated to other lines which are laugh-out-loud funny. Consider a scene where a psychologist (Veronica Falcón) films Braun talking to a teddy bear that doesn’t exist. Falcón, later talking to Wise, asks, “Has Alice taken up any new hobbies lately?” I jokingly piped up with, “You mean like ventriloquism?” Only to find the psychiatrist saying right after me, “Ventriloquism?” With that, I briefly humored the possibility this may be a deeply subversive comedy disguised as a horror film. More likely, however, is it is simply a failed horror movie.
Dir: Jeff Wadlow
Starring DaWanda Wise, Pyper Braun
Watched on Vudu (only as a rental, thank god)