Imaginary (2024)

 

Genre: Horror/ Mystery

Time: 1h 44mins

Director: Jeff Wadlow

Quick Summary: A woman returns to her childhood home to discover that the imaginary friend she left behind is very real and unhappy that she abandoned him.

What the hell were they going to tell the dad at the end? 

Okay okay, this seemed promising in the first half. I was actually excited for this to be A GOOD horror film. The jokes on me, it was okay at best. Don't get me wrong, this is watchable, but I wouldn't call it a great horror. It's basically baby's first horror film. It gently guides you into the shallow end of horror. And that's okay. 

The set-up for this is good I'll admit, aside from probably important information being held up until near the later half. I personally felt like said information would have been better during the start, but who am I to say what's best. The bear honestly was actually pretty creepy. Aside from the times it would be straight staring into the camera which was funny to me. It does take a while for the actually scary parts to happen, for the most of it, it's just creepy moments. 

Something else as well, there are moments where the young girl and the bear talk, and the bear responds, but it's her voice just makes it more "creepy". Honestly, those were so funny to me, as it would just seem so ridiculous, especially during one where the girl is hysterical and sobbing at this bear, like screaming too. The camera would snap between her and the bear with his deadpan stare and bizarre voice, and really I was just debating if this film was actually a comedy or not during this. 

Acting wise, eh. Most of the actors were average at best. They get a pass, as none of them were bad or irritating to me, it's just they weren't anything special. The characters were all super cliche which I don't think helped, especially the teenage daughter who was the most bitchy, grouchy, and unreasonable person I have ever met. Sure, my real mum is actually insane and actually hurt my younger sister, but I'm going to hate on the new step-mum (who actually seems lovely and trying her best) and be a bitch to her. 

The plot, well, it started off alright actually and then it goes off the rail during the last 30 minutes. The first two plot twists that happen were actually pretty clever I'll admit as I didn't see them coming, but then after that, it falls into sadly predictable territory. It fails to put everything together I think. It has all the correct elements sitting right in front of it, but doesn't use all of them and also uses too much of others. There's this old Lady too, which I'm not going to spoil, but my hope went out the window during one scene of this film producing a good ending. I also groaned when it tried to do a fake ending. This really didn't need that, and honestly made the ending worse. 

Something really strange that actually really distracted me the whole way through was how blue the whole film is. Everything is tinted blue, or mostly blue in the scenes. I don't really understand why, but it really irritated me. Everywhere I looked, it was blue. Also, I wish we had a better or longer time to look at the actual monster in the end. We only either got to see it in the dark, or like very briefly in some light. However, at another moment I felt like the monster was pretty cool visually when it was in a different form, having some almost TV screen-looking eyes. 

This film comes across as more silly than creepy for a good portion of the film, which wasn't bad it actually made me enjoy this more than I might have done without. But that meant the actual horror parts of this film felt toned down. A little half-done, and maybe if it had a higher age rating we could have gotten some more scary imagery.

5/10