Imaginary

by Philip Price

Photo: Blumhouse Productions/Lionsgate

Director: Jeff Wadlow
Starring: DeWanda Wise, Tom Payne & Betty Buckley 
Rated: PG-13 (some violent content, drug material & language)
Runtime: 1 hour & 44 minutes 

It needs to be said up front that “Imaginary” is not really a good horror film and that Jeff Wadlow (“Truth or Dare,” “Fantasy Island”) may not be a good filmmaker. He may be a great guy and a pleasure to work with, but a good director? Doesn't seem to be the case. I say this not to be rude and not because half an hour into his latest Blumhouse release the only other people in my theater - a couple in their early to mid-twenties - walked out, but because “Imaginary” functions first as a very obviously constructed movie. That is to say, it makes no qualms about existing in an artificial world where dialogue is just that and the only purpose of sets are in service to the story and not necessarily to implant us into the world of these characters. This is fine enough for some genres and maybe even more forgivable in the horror genre as the audience is aware of the function these characters and their heightened situations are in fact in service of, but Wadlow either doesn't know how to or is unaware he needs to sustain a consistent tone throughout for as soon as Betty Buckley's kooky old lady character enters the picture it's as if the fourth wall breaks and it is made strikingly clear the difference in the contrivances that make a movie and how the honesty of a performance can make or break a viewer's investment.

The screenplay from Wadlow, Greg Erb and Jason Oremland does that thing where a movie does what it thinks a movie is supposed to do but can't tap into why genre movies like the one they're attempting to make work. Horror movies come to be remembered for their scares (of which “Imaginary” has very few) but first leave their imprint on audiences because of the character's journey and the mental or physical exhaustion they are put through on the part of the antagonist. This is where “Imaginary” has potential as I'm sure Wadlow, Erb and Oremland (or at least one of them) intended for the story to be some large allegory for childhood suffering and derangement and certainly the abandonment many face in many forms yet despite the ambition nothing is propelling the narrative forward. What we are instead served is a string of scenarios in which another childhood icon is ruined thanks to a scary movie. Fortunately for teddy bears, the movie’s Chauncey isn't kitschy enough to be camp and Wadlow's moviemaking isn't good enough to render the themes authentic meaning we land somewhere in the middle with a movie that operates on earnest horror tropes but has none of the levels or layers to make it remotely memorable.

What ultimately ends up pushing the movie more to the positive side for me (and I feel this will be very unique to each person) is the final act of the film venturing into the “Kingdom of our Imagination” that looks like something out of an MC Escher painting and is just wild enough to have rendered me intrigued. I don't know if I understood all the rules or knew what was going on at every turn. Still, I appreciate its practicality in design (Chauncey at one point morphs into something that looks like Rahzar from “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze”) and its peculiarities throughout. In addition, Pyper Braun gives a legitimately tortured child performance that hedges the movie in that direction of authenticity before it is immediately upended by a perfectly campy line about ventriloquism which just perfectly encapsulates both everything funny about “Imaginary” and also why it doesn't work at all.

I love a scene when an old person or historian explains the mythology of an antagonist or evil entity though, and this movie has two solid examples of such.