Imaginary could have been a better horror movie. The movie had jumpscares and screaming moments, but overall it wasn’t scary. Although it wouldn’t be appropriate for children because of the sensitive content, it still felt more like a children’s horror movie.
The movie is about a woman named Jessica who does not remember most from her childhood. Later, she discovers that her stepdaughter, Alice, lives the same childhood. The movie starts with Jessica’s family moving into a new home to get her stepchildren away from their abusive mother. As soon as they finished settling in, Jessica and Alice decided to play hide and seek. While Alice is seeking she goes down into the basement because she hears a voice. She then opens a door and finds Chauncey. She carries Chauncey to her room and talks to him instead because Jessica is always busy with work.
The concept of Alice finding Chauncey is cliche. It happens in most horror movies. Someone hears a creepy voice coming from dark places and they follow it. Although it was cliche, it was still one of the scariest moments of the whole movie.
When the neighbor comes into the picture, the mood changes. Alice starts doing weird tasks for her scavenger hunt. Jessica walks into her room and thinks she’s talking to Alice but she’s not. Jessica runs to find Alice doing something dangerous and quickly runs to stop her. That part was suspenseful it had you on the edge of your seat wondering what was going to happen to Alice later on in the movie.
Moving onto the ending, it needed to be clarified. It was good when it came to matching the beginning place of Jessica’s nightmare but Chauncey did not look like a bear. That is not what you envision as a scary teddy bear. He was not frightening. It threw the whole movie off.
The best part of the ending was the neighbor lady turning from them. It was suspenseful, and it made you curious about how they would get out. Though after the neighbor turned it was not suspenseful nor scary. It turned back to Alice’s imagination with her birth mother. Jessica starts to tear stuff up in the room to find blue objects and somehow makes a door out of things like tissue paper, toys, cupcakes and anything else they can see that is blue. They use their imagination to form a door, although Jessica doesn’t make it out, she fights back.
A character that felt missing from the movie was Jessica’s husband. He was barely shown in the movie. It was peculiar he was never there whenever anything happened, but said that Alice had an imaginary friend. How did he know?
It was predictable when something scary happened, which ruined the jumpscares. Overall, the movie was okay but not something to watch more than once.
