Imaginary (2024)

Jeff Wadlow's Imaginary arrives as a modest Blumhouse proposition: a stepmother, a haunted teddy bear, and a portal behind the drywall. DeWanda Wise anchors the proceedings as Jessica, a children's author who moves her new family into the house where her own childhood went sideways, and the film deserves a nod for assembling a principal cast that does not look like the genre's default settings. Verónica Falcón turns up as the child psychologist, dispensing exposition with professional calm. The movie never remarks on any of this, which is to its credit. Diversity that simply exists on screen is not a thesis. It is casting.

The domestic architecture here is a stepmother and two stepdaughters, which places women at the center of the terror and keeps them there. Whether that constitutes a statement about anything is doubtful. Jessica saves the day with scissors and maternal resolve, Taylor sulks convincingly as the resentful teenager, and little Alice befriends the wrong stuffed animal. Nobody delivers a speech about patriarchy. Nobody needs to. The film is far too busy explaining the mechanics of the Never Ever, a dimension where abandoned imaginary friends nurse their grudges, to bother with moral instruction. Ben, the institutionalized father, supplies the closest thing to psychological texture, and mental illness earns its keep as a plot device, not a cause.

What remains is a scare machine running on fumes. The critical consensus was unkind, the Cinemascore landed at a C+, and the box office was respectable without being remarkable. There is no sermonizing, no lecture, no lesson about the way we live now. Just a spider with unsettling eyes and a bear who wants his friend back. We classify it, we note its faint progressive currents, and we move on to the next screening.