Imaginary

 Imaginary is the latest lump of steaming mediocrity excreted from producer Jason Blum's cloaca. A misbegotten, hilariously unscary screen saver for teens not to pay attention to while they try to fondle each other's naughty bits.

 Jessica (DeWanda Wise) has recently married Max (Tom Payne), a sweet, hunky brit who came with two children from a previous marriage: Taylor (Taegen Burns), an insufferable, stroppy teen who hates Jessica's guts for daring try to replace their mum, and Alice (Pyper Braun), a cute little moppet of seven or so.

 When they move to Jess's family home, Alice finds an old teddy bear whom she adopts as an imaginary friend. Soon she's acting out, talking to herself Gollum-style, and dropping ominous hints. Soon the plot thickens to include a nosy neighbour (Betty Buckley) who probably knows more than she lets on, a secret from Jess's childhood, and a more concrete supernatural menace; It all leads to various family breakthroughs, a lot of talking down to the audience, and laughable, doomed attempts at scares.

 All the expected light horror elements are here, slightly rearranged. And by light, I mean nearly weightless; Director Jeff Wadlow seems terrified of actually including any actual horror whatsoever, and what's there seems specifically geared at avoiding giving very young viewers a rough night, let alone nightmares. I do wonder if it's not meant to be aimed at children - if that's the case, it's got some stiff competition from The Imaginary, on the account that it explores some similar themes and that it's actually, you know, good. Put it next to Coraline, and this film would go running straight home to cry to its mom.

Children peeking through the banister is a bit of a visual cliché, isn't it?

 The script is written by Wadlow plus Greg Erb and Jason Oremland - the last two seem to have a background in kids' entertainment, which would seem to support calling this a 'my first horror movie' attempt. And to be honest, I can see myself enjoying this when I was ten. But to belabour an obvious point: it's fucking easy to cater to kids, but it's a whole other thing to make something that works for both them and adults at the same time. This film doesn't even come close to that.

 Here's a spoiler for one of the most inane mid-movie twists I've seen in a long time: The bear Pyper keeps lugging around? It doesn't exist! It's imaginary! It's just such a fucking non-starter of a plot point... I mean, it literally changes nothing at fucking all, but the film still does a Sixth-Sense-style victory lap showing all the times in previous scenes where the bear wasn't actually there. Dumb, dumb, dumb. And that's far from the only time the script wastes a lot of time overexplaining whatever's just happened.

 Elsewhere, no one behaves like a relatable, believable human being. The acting ranges from OK to terrible, but I'd hesitate blaming any of the actors when they have to work with this material, and with a director I suspect is not very good with actors.

 Speaking of: Wadlow is otherwise competent as a director, but he fails to inject any sort of imagination or energy anywhere; Imaginary's visual ideas are extremely trite and uninteresting. Just about the one positive thing I can say about the plot - that it goes a little further than you'd expect - is completely ruined by the botched visualization of its biggest idea, an imaginary realm consisting wholly of borrowed, watered-down references: A little Monster's Inc, a little Hellbound, a lot of Tim Burton and M. C. Escher. I know I'm making it sound interesting, but trust me - it really isn't.

 It's all too mediocre to even recommend as a bad film. I did get a couple of chuckles at how it works overtime to try and make things creepy without a clear idea of how to do so; There are several shots of figures lurking in the background, which would work better if they were building up to something or if the film managed to build any sense of menace whatsoever. There's a single scene where it looks like things might get serious, but Imaginary chickens out and it's defused almost immediately. And don't get me started on all the scenes where the shock is... that a teddy bear moved slightly. At least they change him to squint at one point, that did make me laugh.

 My favorite's blunder's got to be an early shot that ominously zooms in on... a wall. It's not even a particularly scary wall, it's got a flower sticker and everything. But the way the horror-coded music swells, you'd think a gutted corpse is going to drop into frame or something.

 That does kind of make sense later, but it's a while before we get that critical bit of context; As it is, it's yet another bodged, half-assed attempt to use visual language to... I guess what bothers me is that it keeps  saying it's scary, without any work done to actually make it scary. Screw this noise.