If you’ve ever stared at a child’s teddy bear and thought, “I wish this thing would drag my soul into a PG-13 hellscape of mediocre jump scares,” Imaginary is technically the answer to your prayer. Unfortunately, like most cursed objects, it sounds way cooler than it actually is.
Jeff Wadlow’s latest Blumhouse outing takes a premise that should be gloriously unhinged—evil imaginary friend teddy named Chauncey—and turns it into a watchable but aggressively forgettable mess. Even Variety literally called it “a watchable mess of a child’s-play fright flick,” which is a very polite way of saying, “It played. My eyes were open.”
Build-A-Bear Workshop of Trauma
Our heroine Jessica (DeWanda Wise) is a children’s book author who returns to her childhood home with her musician husband Max and his two daughters: teen Taylor and grade-school Alice.
Jessica has:
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unresolved trauma involving her mentally ill father Ben,
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nightmares starring a humanoid spider from her own stories (Simon),
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and the kind of vibes that scream “I absolutely should not be living in a house with an attic.”
Alice promptly discovers Chauncey the teddy bear in the basement and forms an intense bond with him because of course she does—kids in horror never pick something harmless like a soccer ball. Soon, only Jessica and Alice can see Chauncey, he’s manipulating “games” that escalate from weird to dangerous, and the movie starts whispering, “Maybe the real monster is unprocessed childhood trauma,” while simultaneously giving us a literal monster bear.
All of this has the makings of a solid, maybe even clever studio horror. Instead, Imaginary plays like a blender version of Insidious, Poltergeist, It, and “every Blumhouse PG-13 not named M3GAN” with the safety on. One critic straight-up noted it “borrows quite liberally” from those earlier films and “gets way too complicated and fails because of it.”
Chauncey the Bear: No, He’s Not M3GAN
The big problem is tone. When your villain is an invisible evil teddy bear, you either:
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Lean into the absurdity and go campy, or
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Make it so unsettling that people fear the plush aisle at Target.
Wadlow somehow chooses option 3: act like this is all Very Serious Business and hope nobody notices Chauncey looks like rejected merch. Slant Magazine nailed it: the film “never thinks to lean into the blatant silliness” of the premise and instead stays “a frustratingly dour and humorless affair,” failing to deliver “a single scare or even set a discernibly creepy mood.”
There are occasional jolts—Chauncey briefly morphing into a monstrous bear, a few loud noises—but it’s the cinematic equivalent of someone sneaking up behind you and clapping directly in your ear: technically startling, spiritually annoying. One reviewer summed it up perfectly: “As much as it tries, Imaginary offers nothing truly scary.”
Even the supposedly big third-act dimension, “The Never Ever,” feels like a discount Upside Down with less personality. We’re told it’s the spooky otherworld where all imaginary friends lurk, but it mostly looks like a Halloween maze sponsored by the concept of copyright-safe nostalgia.
Lore, Lore Everywhere, And Not a Thought to Think
Like a lot of recent studio horror, Imaginary starts as a simple, promising setup and then absolutely overdoses on lore. We get:
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Imaginary friends are actually spirits tethered to kids.
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There’s a shared realm (The Never Ever) connecting them all.
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Jessica went there as a child.
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Her dad went insane after seeing Chauncey’s true eyes.
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Gloria the neighbor has been in contact with Chauncey and wants power.
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Jessica’s childhood drawings were secret foreshadowing.
By the time we hit the final act—with glowing doors, scavenger hunts, reality fake-outs, spider monsters, and a “you’re still in the other realm” twist—you can practically feel the screenplay checking off boxes. Even The New York Times noted the movie flirts with a “sophisticated allegory” but “loses its nerve,” ending up as a heap of half-baked ideas instead of a coherent story.
The Movie Buff review was even less polite, basically saying it “should have been a simple horror movie about a kid and her imaginary friend” but “gets way too complicated and fails because of it.”
It’s the horror equivalent of a kid insisting the rules of the game are very clear, then changing them mid-round.
PG-13 Purgatory
Blumhouse loves PG-13 horror because it prints money—you can scare teens in bulk and still sell popcorn. Sometimes that works (hi, M3GAN). Here, the restraint is just suffocating. Imaginary keeps hinting it wants to get nastier—The Never Ever, a spider demon, Chauncey’s “real” form—but it never fully goes there. As one review put it, the film “wants to go all macabre during the second half,” but without an R-rating “honestly, it doesn’t have the [freedom] to go there.”
So instead we get a lot of loud sound cues, quick-cut hints of horror, and then… nothing. CinemaScore audiences gave it a C+, and PostTrak reported just 57% overall positive—numbers that basically translate to, “It existed, I guess.”
Even poor Chauncey feels neutered. SFW Magazine bluntly observed that the premise “could have been a nice little horror, but Chauncey the bear is just that, a bear,” and we “plod through” the film with standard modern tropes and only the “occasional moment of something in the darkness.”
When critics are sighing that your possessed teddy is just “a bear,” you know the spell didn’t take.
DeWanda Wise Deserved Better (Again)
If the movie works at all, it’s mostly thanks to DeWanda Wise, who treats this goofy setup like it’s Hereditary and she’s being paid in Oscars. Critics routinely point out that her performance, along with the younger cast, is one of the few bright spots.
She sells Jessica’s fractured psyche, the buried childhood horrors, the stepmom guilt. She even sells scenes where she has to treat a stuffed bear like an existential threat instead of a future clearance rack item. Unfortunately, no amount of committed acting can fix direction that Robert Abele called “terrible with actors,” joking that Wadlow “can even make a motionless plush animal seem poorly directed.”
When critics are dragging your blocking choices for inanimate objects, it might be time to re-evaluate your shot list.
Imaginary Scares, Real Money
To be fair, the movie did fine financially: about $43.7 million worldwide on a $10–13 million budget. That’s not a smash, but it’s solid enough that Blumhouse will happily keep feeding us mid-tier “what if X was evil” premises until the sun implodes.
Critically, though, it joined Night Swim in Blumhouse’s recent “Rotten or close to it” streak, with Screen Rant noting that Imaginary continues the studio’s trend of low Rotten Tomatoes scores and is “the latest poorly received effort for Wadlow.”
That tracks: reviews describe it as “starved for scenes that make the fear relatable” (Variety), a film that “forgets the scares” (The Hollywood Reporter), and a teddy-bear horror story that “lacks much imagination of its own” (IndieWire).
Which is almost impressive: you called the movie Imaginary and then made a film people immediately forget.
Final Verdict: Chauncey, Please Stay Imaginary
In another universe, Imaginary is a nasty, weird little horror gem: a story about childhood trauma, imaginary friends as parasitic spirits, and a teddy bear that becomes an icon of millennial therapy bills.
In this universe, it’s:
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technically competent,
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occasionally fun in a “this will be on streaming while I scroll my phone” way,
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and thoroughly, stubbornly mediocre.
If you’ve got a soft spot for Blumhouse comfort-junk and want something low-stakes to half-watch, Chauncey and his dimension of vaguely defined rules are there for you. But if you’re hoping for a new horror icon or anything that makes you look twice at a stuffed animal?
Don’t worry.
Like your childhood imaginary friend—and most of Jeff Wadlow’s horror filmography—you’ll probably forget Imaginaryever existed by the time you reach the parking lot.
