Imaginary

Grade: D+

Not even a third of the way through March, here we have it: the stupidest movie of the year. Imaginary is a lame, inane, insane, intellectually bankrupt mess. The lines are obvious to the point where I was often able to mouth them along with the characters. Director Jeff Wadlow’s credits include a few episodes of Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark reboot. Whatever ones he worked on, they are smarter and higher quality than Imaginary. The movie’s last half hour has some of the most ludicrous stuff I’ve seen. As anxious as I am to get into that, I’ll come back to it in a little while.

The middle of May will see a release of IF. It stands for “imaginary friend,” and is a lighthearted comedy fantasy with a stacked cast headed up by Ryan Reynolds. Jokes have been going around about how it’s a good thing Imaginary and IF didn’t come out closer together, otherwise there might be some unfortunate confusion. IF looks to be okay for children, and Imaginary plays like it was written by a committee of children. The latter is the latest Blumhouse horror movie – unfortunately closer to Night Swim, M3GAN, and Ma than to The Black Phone, The Invisible Man, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and The Hunt. Its PG-13 rating means nothing can get too graphic, so Wadlow makes desperate attempts to scare us in other ways. No amount of camera-tilting or ominous music will make a piece of paper frightening.

The movie opens with a sequence the viewer will come to understand the meaning of later. It turns out to be a dream, in the first of a few fake-outs we get. Our heroine has studied how people in the movies wake up from nightmares, startling herself awake with a loud gasp. Sometimes that’s accompanied by sitting straight up in bed. She is Jessica (DeWanda Wise), married to Max (Tom Payne). They have recently moved into Jessica’s childhood home. I’m not sure what Max does for a living. I assume it’s a musician, because the film conveniently gets rid of him for most of the duration by having him go “on tour” – leaving Jessica to do her best version of the stepmom thing to Jason’s daughters from his first marriage: teenager Taylor (Taegen Burns) and under-10 Alice (Pyper Braun).

Alice finds and befriends a stuffed bear, that he tells her is named Chauncey. He plays a little jingle if you pull a string. Be prepared for an earworm that will not leave your head for the rest of the day. Not only do we hear it over and over, but it’s incorporated into the score, so many times. The string players in the orchestra here have some serious job security. Back to Chauncey: the only way we ever hear Chauncey’s voice is through Alice, sporadically speaking as him. She is fiercely devoted to him, and he talks in a Tarzan-esque broken English – with statements like “Chauncey only one who love Alice.” It’s a Child’s Play/Shining/Brahms kind of relationship; Chauncey tells her to collect things, and do some dangerous things Alice would rather not do, but she doesn’t want to upset Chauncey. It’s called a scavenger hunt, which is funny, because watching Imaginary becomes like a game of spotting the many many influences it unoriginally copies from.

Betty Buckley plays a neighbor who has never moved, and spent all these decades doing nothing but waiting for the moment where what happened in Jessica’s childhood comes full circle and takes place again. She shows up mostly in the final act, where almost literally everything she says is a backstory information dump. The last sequence will make you howl with laughter. It’s absurd. The sets and special effects are cheap. The creatures are, too, and they are taken care of too easily. There’s a fake-out which is somewhere near “it was all a dream” and “the killer’s not really dead” on the manipulation scale. I almost have to give the movie a little credit for getting so goofy. Imaginary will not be taken seriously by anyone. Hey, I had a random thought: I no longer have that melody in my head. Small victories!

Grade: D+