What’s It About
Jessica returns to her old family home, where her youngest stepdaughter, Alice, forms a disturbing bond with a teddy bear found in the basement named Chauncey. What begins as an innocent game progressively turns into something dark and disturbing. Jessica’s concern grows as she discovers that Chauncey is much more than just a toy.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
In Imaginary, a horror movie that tries to sprinkle a little bit of everything from suspense to fantasy, we follow the story of Jessica, played by DeWanda Wise. She’s a famous children’s book writer who’s just moved into her old childhood home with her new family. This includes her husband, Max (Tom Payne), a rock musician, and his two daughters from a previous marriage, the moody teenager Taylor (Taegen Burns) and the younger, more open-hearted Alice (Pyper Braun). The family’s trying to glue themselves together amidst a bunch of personal dramas, like Jessica’s dad being in a near-zombie state in a caring place after something super wrong happened a long time ago and the girls’ mom not being around because of her battle with mental health issues. The twist in their new but old home starts with Alice finding a teddy bear named Chauncey, who becomes her imaginary friend. During a game of hide-and-seek, Chauncey asks Alice to do risky stuff to prove their friendship. This bear isn’t just a fluffy toy but a ticket to a world of nightmares that somehow link back to Jessica’s past nightmares and many characters from her book. As the family tries to handle the weirdness of their situation, they get visited by Gloria (Betty Buckley), Jessica’s childhood babysitter, who knows a thing or two about imaginary friends and nightmare fuel from back in the day. This is where the movie tries to shift gears into something like a mix between a ghost story and a trip down a CGI-filled rabbit hole that feels like it was trying to be cool but kinda misses the mark. Imaginary is juggling too many balls and ends up dropping most of them. The movie wants to scare you, make you laugh, and maybe even make you think about family and trauma, but it can’t seem to stick to one path. It wanted to be a bit of everything – a chilling tale with a touch of fantasy and some family drama – but ends up not entirely satisfying on any front. The performances are decent, with Wise standing out as Jessica, trying to keep her family together while fighting off literal and metaphorical bear demons. The kids, especially Braun as Alice, do a pretty good job of making us believe in their mixed-up reality. However, the script doesn’t do them many favors, coming off as a bit too on-the-nose without the subtlety you’d want from a thriller that’s supposed to keep you guessing. Imaginary throws in many ideas, like the trauma from our past shaping our present, how imagination can be both an escape and a prison, and the lengths we’ll go to for family. But it struggles to make these themes land. Instead of being the next big thing in horror, it becomes a forgettable mishmash that can’t decide if it wants to scare you, make you think, or both. It’s not the worst way to spend a couple of hours, but it might leave you wishing for a bit more imagination in a movie that’s supposed to be all about the power of it.
OUR RATING – A CHAUNCEY 6.5