Review: IMAGINARY

Jessica writes and illustrates popular children's books with a kiddy gothic slant. She persuades her new family to move into her childhood home where a sketchy trauma left her in care and her father in intensive care. She's having trouble getting her stepkids to like her but is making some progress with the younger one who shows signs of trauma of her own. The teen bitch older one is not letting her in at all. So, during a bonding game of hide and seek, young Alice goes down to the creepy basement where she finds an old teddy bear and makes a new imaginary friend. Cool and normal.

I can say in this film's defence that its persistent pursuit of the theme of trauma-enforced imagination keeps it coherent and logical. Beyond that it's a matter of a string of convincing practical effects, some deft ol' fashioned film technique and a score that continually says, "FEEL THIS!". These characters and events feel standard, copied from the training manual. If that has set you on an ironic thought that a film called imaginary has been made without imagination, it should. 

Acting is fine but rendered hollow by a screenplay that tells rather than shows (the character of Gloria becomes an on-set narration sidebar at one point), so it doesn't matter how well these actors perform, they are at the mercy of material that forbids escape. Also, while there are slivers of creativity in some scenes, effects, moments of eeriness, the movie wrenches its audience back from the brink lest it should ... scare you, or summin'.

As I left the cinema and began my short trek home, having bade ta ta to my similarly unmoved companions, and the experience of this movie was crumbling to tiny crystals which fell to numb space around them, I wondered what I could think to write about this title. The answer is before you and it's, "not much."