Imaginary

Directed by Jeff Wadlow, Imaginary follows DeWanda Wise’s Jessica as she becomes increasingly convinced that her step-daughter’s (Pyper Braun’s Alice) imaginary friend is actually real (and malevolent). It’s a stirring premise that’s employed to progressively unwatchable effect by Wadlow, as the filmmaker, armed with a script written alongside Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, offers up a deliberate and often astonishingly sluggish misfire that contains little in the way of compelling, attention-grabbing attributes – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by an almost total lack of scares, a distressingly low body count, and several laughably inept periphery performances. And while the early part of the picture contains a very small handful of engaging sequences, including an effective scene wherein the teen next door is menaced by the central antagonist (although the lack of a satisfying payoff diminishes the impact of this interlude), Imaginary, which admittedly does boast a decent twist at around the halfway point, builds towards an absolutely endless third act that ensures the whole thing peters out to a fairly stunning degree – with the end result a hopelessly underwhelming and uninvolving disaster that squanders its promising setup.

* out of ****