Imaginary

Director: Jeff Wadlow (USA). Year of Release: 2024

A woman bursts through a miniature door in a blue-tinged room, apologising that she could not finish the game. She is grabbed by a large bloody man with a fearful face. The man talks of his fear that she won’t return. He transforms into a giant spider, and pursues the woman through long corridors. As his tentacles hover above her, it looks like he’s going to catch her any minute. The woman looks absolutely terrified.

And then she wakes up. Her partner asks her if she’s been having one of her nightmares.

Jessica is an author of graphic novels about Molly Millipede and her nemesis Simon the Spider. Recently she’s been suffering both from writer’s block and deeply disturbing nightmares. Fortunately, he father’s house – the one she grew up in – has become recently vacant (you can still smell the fresh paint), so maybe moving back to her childhood home will help fix her mind. She’ll be moving with her partner, Max, and his 2 kids – the cute Alice and the sullen teenager Taylor.

There are good reasons for setting a horror film in a huge house – plenty of places for people to get lost, including the obligatory creepy cellar – but it makes it much more difficult to feel empathy for someone who’s living room is larger than your whole flat. The house is inherited from Jessica’s dad, but as a cartoon artist and author she seems to he comfortably off, even without the extra money which is presumably coming in from Max’s work as a musician.

Max doesn’t stay around for long. Pretty soon he’s packing his guitar case (or whatever it is he plays – he’s not well enough written for even this to be clear) and going on the road with his band. To give him his due, he does ask Jessica if she’s ok with that, but she is in such a clearly traumatized state that he’s either not good at reading the room, or he’d much prefer to go out drinking and playing music with his mates than looking after a woman on the edge.

This leaves Jessica alone in her huge home with Taylor, who clearly resents her for not being her real mum, and Alice, who has her own issues to work through. Alice has a burn on her arm, and a consequent fear of fire. We obliquely learn that this was caused by her mentally unstable mother. Jessica’s arm carries a similar burn, also the result of a parental confrontation. Alice’s trauma deepens when her mother returns, but she only appears for one scene, and we don’t hear from her again.

You’d have thought that all this would mean that Jessica spent extra care looking after her adopted daughter, but in the absence of her slacker boyfriend, its hard to keep on top of everything. In the middle of a game of hide and seek, Jessica gets a work call, and Alice slips away into the cellar. There she finds her stepmother’s old stuffed bear who she christens Chauncey. Before long, Alice is more interested in playing with, and speaking to, Charney, than she is with Jessica.

One of the many things that irritates me about Imaginary is the premise that all kids have an imaginary friend, and that anyone who claims that they didn’t make up a pal is just kidding themself. While imaginary friends do exist and can play a healthy part of children’s emotional development, they are not universal. So, Imaginary’s premise that maybe some kids’ imaginary friends are a force for Evil not Good, is interesting enough, but based on flawed logic.

Nonetheless, a more effective writer could have done something interesting with this idea. But Chauncey’s malign influence is just too random, too detached from reality. He feels less a product of Alice’s anxious subconscience than of a desperate script writer (it doesn’t help that when a child psychologist is summoned and observes Alice talking to the bear she comes up with a line like: “Has she taken up any new hobbies lately? Ventriloquism?”).

Imaginary has been universally panned by critics, but there’s a difference of opinion about whether the truly dreadful part of the film is in the first or second half. I’m definitely in the latter camp. For the start of the film, it’s easy enough to go along with the slightly bland portrayal of a damaged family. As we reach about the halfway stage, though, we experience a series of unconnected inexplicable events (more than one character utters: “but that just doesn’t make any sense”).

I think the tide starts to turn with the appearance of Gloria, a neighbour who used to babysit Jessica (though Jessica has no memory of this) and just happens to be an academic author specialising in the psychology of imaginary friends, or paracosm as she calls it. Gloria’s main function is to deliver the lengthy pieces of expositional dialogue which we really need because by this stage nothing has any fucking logic at all.

This results in a horror comedy without any scary scenes or jokes. Imaginary has set itself up as having something important to say about the world – another Babbadook, say, but completely fails to deliver on any level. Whereas The Babbadook uses conventional horror tropes to show us the manifestations of very real traumas of a woman and her daughter, Imaginary jumbles together a few vague ideas that it’s seen in other films and asks “Will this do?”

You end up asking: just what was the point in all this? The film doesn’t make a case for anything – it doesn’t even have the coherence to take any idea to its conclusion. The largely uninspiring characters are vaguely bland, and speak dialogue which no-one ever uses in real life. There is little attempt to engage with the audience. Worst of all, it is just no fun. We are neither laughing at Imaginary or with it. We are not laughing at all.