When Jessica moves back into her childhood home with her family, her youngest stepdaughter Alice develops an eerie attachment to a stuffed bear named Chauncey she finds in the basement. Alice start...
Well well well, Jeff Wadlow. It’s been far too long since I’ve seen your cheeky, convoluted little disasterpieces, 4 years in fact. And with Blumhouse being the comically extreme enigma it’s become with its hits and misses, there was no doubt in my mind “Imaginary” would be the drizzling shits.
Two words, Jeff: Please. Stop.
So much of Jeff Wadlow’s range as a director has that amateurish ringmaster aura: every time feels like his first time. Just taking it scene by scene, his style is very strict, heavily limited, feels purposefully boxed in with little breathing room like the Britney Spears snake constricting the life out of you. This is probably the most telegraphed of his work I’ve seen yet.
Visually speaking, Wadlow’s films still don’t look all that interesting and I’m being charitable when I say that. To put it more bluntly, between the over-reliance on soft or Bloom lighting and the Carfax car commercial visual aesthetic, THE FILM LOOKS FUCKING UGLY; it’s pretty much the equivalent of pretending the camera lens is smeared with dried up baking grease. Only two slick editing transitions and a mid batting average for competent framing and shots come out of that and everything else about the way the camera is shot holds little to no interest.
Not to mention, it drags along as mechanically, artificially slow as possible; it doesn’t take an eternity to go anywhere but you will feel the length. This is especially the case in the second and third act, when it barrels through dull and repetitive set designs with little to no visual allure to where even some impressive M.C. Escher-inspired production design in the final act feels too familiar and basic to really be immersed. If the juvenile look and feel of the film wasn’t disengaging enough, its dumb and goofy VFX only add to the egregious lack of tension and its utterly abysmal excuse for competent scares. Even its practical effects are made to look stupid as a result of that.
Also, no disrespect to Bear McCreary; his music is by far the best thing about this sad piece of abandonware but I argue even that barely matches up with what happens on screen, especially when you consider this is a presentation that’s been done before countless times and is rendered laughable here. And as is the case for most Wadlow films, dialogue is wooden and/or stiff and its large foray of characters collectively have the brains of expired Yogurt, with infantile development ranging between them all and average to utterly dull performances to boot too. Betty Buckley seemed to understand the assignment enough but honestly, the Night Swim ensemble makes the rest of these characters look dumber than a block of tofu.
So the basis for most Jeff Wadlow films I’ve seen boils down to this: his ideas and concepts have always been one or two fine-tunes away from being really compelling but every plot of his gets diverted by trying to piece together a story out of myriad meaningless plot threads. Here, it’s not any different; if anything, it’s the worst of his films I’ve seen yet. And it all boils down to that classic Jeff Wadlow debacle: its inconsistency in tone and lack of commitment to its ideas. Red flags start flying off the handle almost as soon as the movie starts and when the story finally plays its fragile, unsteady hand, every rote, predictable horror trope laid out on the table just balloons into dead air and empty filler with the most haphazard connective tissue imaginable. Look, being 'original' in the film world is often a challenge, because it is easy to fall back on well-known formulas that have already proven successful but this film practically jumps out of its skin screaming of its desired importance with the bare minimum effort to show for it.
For such a high concept, it spends almost all its time pilfering its ideas from other films: one part Poltergeist, another part Nightmare on Elm Street, three parts Labyrinth, some parts a M3GAN rip-off and it leaves little room for, well, imagination. Structuring this skin-peelingly annoying lumpy waterbed like the El Toro at Six Flags was never going make for a convincing psycho thriller; the rules it sets up are both arbitrary and all too easy to complicate or break, its way too safe for any of those stakes to matter, its exposition exhibits all the tedium of a rushed book report and it is agonizingly uneven in both tone and execution.
I am heavily convinced this shameless grab bag of stolen parts was fully intended to melt your intention span into butter. For a film that lauds itself on the premise that driving your imagination from a source of repressed trauma and pain is one of the most powerful forces of all, it actively tries to neglect the ethos of that barely existing message. Any ramblings it pertains to dementia, loss and guilt, will be lost on you by the end because it gives you no reason to care about these carbon cutout idiots or buy into how imagination thrives off of a world this bareboned and unimaginative to begin with.
All bets are off IF will be the better movie about imaginary friends because this is a very low bar to clear.
