Imaginary
He just wants to be your teddy bear.
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Film fans that know of director Jeff Wadlow probably think he’s a hack – and to a certain extent he is – but he’s also made a handful of flicks which I regard as guilty pleasures. These would be the aughts MMA “Karate Kid” riff “Never Back Down” (Amber Heard plays a character named Baja Miller, whom my wife and I lovingly refer to as Baja Gordita) and 2020’s “Fantasy Island” redux (It’s hard not to have fun watching Ryan Hansen and Jimmy O. Yang’s characters feed hand grenades into a pitching machine.). Wadlow’s latest is the PG-13 Blumhouse horror production “Imaginary” (now in theaters).
DeWanda Wise stars as children’s book author and illustrator Jessica. She’s married to musician Max (English actor Tom Payne … if I were this dude I’d go by the nickname T-Payne) and stepmom to his daughters Taylor (Taegen Burns, “The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers”) and Alice (Pyper Braun of last year’s “Desperation Road”).
The girls’ mother Samantha (Alix Angelis) is mentally unwell. The new family unit, looking for space and a fresh start, moves into Jessica’s childhood home. The teenage Taylor isn’t taking too kindly to her new stepparent whereas the much younger Alice is receptive to Jessica’s mothering.
Alice finds and befriends a teddy bear named Chauncey in the house’s basement. She carries on conversations with the stuffed animal and the two play games together including going on a scavenger hunt with escalating stakes.
The more time Alice spends with Chauncey the stranger her behavior gets. Jessica enlists the services of child psychiatrist Dr. Soto (Veronica Falcón) and her next door neighbor/former nanny Gloria (Betty Buckley, she was the gym teacher Miss Collins in Brian De Palma’s “Carrie”) to get to the bottom of the girl’s problems.
Max leaves town to go on tour and as soon as he does all hell breaks loose.
“Imaginary” leans harder into the fantastical than it does the horrific and could serve as a good gateway movie to burgeoning pre-teen genre fans. I did dig much of the world-building established by Wadlow and his co-screenwriters Greg Erb and Jason Oremland (these two previously scripted 2019’s animated “Playmobil: The Movie”) even if a somewhat goofy plot twist undoes a lot of their groundwork. The film also arguably has one or two too many endings and would’ve played better at an hour and a half as opposed to 104 minutes.
What makes a lot of “Imaginary” work are the performances of Wise (whom I liked in “Jurassic World Dominion” and like here), child actors Burns and Braun (this tyke has a few line deliveries that tickled me greatly) and Buckley, who hams it up real good. Payne doesn’t make as much of an impression, but the writers also largely jettison his character from the picture’s back half.
Blumhouse has been on a bit of a qualitative losing streak of late with “The Exorcist: Believer,” “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “Night Swim” – “Imaginary” is undoubtedly better than all of these. It doesn’t hit anywhere near the heights of the production company’s other recent killer doll feature (2023’s “M3GAN”), but it certainly qualifies as yet another Wadlow guilty pleasure.