Imaginary horror movie review

Imaginary is a horror mystery movie that was released, in theaters, on Mar. 8. This was not the worst movie I have ever seen, but it was not great by any means. I feel like it had a lot of potential had they taken a different approach. 

   There was very, very little advertising for this movie, which should have been the first red flag. I had never seen anything for it, I saw it on a theater website and watched the trailer after that. But normally if there is little advertising on a movie, it does not perform well. The basic idea of the movie is that there is a little stuffed bear, Chauncey. He haunts this little girl she finds it in the basement of their new home, the stepmoms house childhood home. 

   At some point we find out that the stepmom also was haunted by this little bear and had absolutely no memories of it. There are a lot of little random things in this movie that simply do not make sense or are just out of place. The stepmom going through the exact same thing with no memory of it, to me, just does not make sense. 

   For some reason there is an old lady that shows up in the beginning saying she used to babysit the stepmom and then she shows up later in the movie and is essentially “working with” the bear, I guess… Another thing that did not exactly add up.

   The whole movie really lacks jump scares, there are a few attempts, but they are super predictable. The storyline is too slow and vague in my opinion to really find it creepy. During the movie, multiple different groups of people left because the movie just was not very entertaining. The end drags on, you feel like the movie is going to end and then it just keeps going. But oddly enough, at the same time, it feels like the story is so rushed.

   If they had taken a perspective like other movies such as Annabelle or Chucky, it could have been good. Not actually seeing the bear do anything, or even really move, or cause any chaos, just brought the movie down. You basically just watch a little girl carry the bear around for the whole movie and talk to it. There are a lot of random characters, there is a teen boy that shows up for a few scenes and then leaves without adding much of anything. We also see the father for the first two minutes and then not again. Also, viewers can infer that the biological mom of the kids is mentally unstable, potentially in a psych facility. But the mother also shows up for a scene and I do not really understand how it was relevant or why it happened. The story is about the bear, but the bear never really does anything. 

   This movie has about 4/10-star ratings with IMDb and about 25% with Rotten Tomatoes. I would not recommend this movie personally. It was boring, slow, confusing, and consisted of quite literally, no scare inducing scenes of any kind.