Imaginary: Evil Teddy

Jessica (DeWanda Wise) is a successful children’s book author with a very vivid imagination.  Her own childhood was wrought with tragedy, her mother died of cancer and her father had a mental breakdown soon after.  She, herself, suffers from bad dreams.   She is married to Max (Tom Payne), a musician, who has two daughters from a previous marriage, the youngest, Alice (Pyper Braun) and Taylor (Taegen Burns) the rebellious teen who resents Jessica.  When her father is moved into an assisted living complex, Jessica and family move into her childhood home, where Alice soon finds a teddy bear who becomes her imaginary friend Chauncy.  Nosey neighbor, Gloria (Betty Buckley) used to babysit Jessica when she was a child, but Jessica remembers little about her early childhood, not even that she too, had an imaginary friend.  When Chauncy starts Alice collecting things for a scavenger hunt, things start to get spooky.  Eventually Alice disappears and the search for her leads to an unexpected place and not every friend is really a friend.

Imaginary is an atmospheric supernatural horror film directed by Jeff Wadlow and produced by Blumhouse Productions. It hit theaters on March 8, 2024 to mixed reviews most of which praise the cast and the story premise, but find the movie’s pacing a bit off and it devolves into cliched horror tropes. The film had a budget of $12 million and has grossed $33.4 million worldwide.  With its financial success I bet we will see a sequel in the future.

There are films whose trailers give a false impression of what the movie is going to be and there are other films where the trailer consists of all the good parts of the movie, in both cases there is a sense of disappointment after watching the film.  The trailer for Imaginary showed an interesting premise, but I feel it gave a bit of a higher expectation of how “supernatural” this movie was going to be.  I felt the first part of the film moved a bit slowly, and although there are some wonderful subtle images wedged into the background that give that ultra spooky vibe, I didn’t feel like a lot happens in the first half of the film.  The second half made up for it and I did enjoy the overall story.  The actors are all very well cast, and it was amazing seeing Betty Buckley still working and playing a significant role.  I must agree with most of the other critics that the movie is a bit inconsistent with a strong premise and some interesting characters with deep rooted emotional issues played excellently by the cast, but the beginning felt very slow, and the overall story is rather predictable with only a few good twists and some spooky atmospheric imagery that kept it interesting.  Overall, it was a completely watchable film, but with some not so imaginary issues.