104 min | PG-13 | March 8, 2024 | Lionsgate
Blumhouse makes a horror movie about a haunted teddy bear. The bear is named Chauncey. The scares are named absent.
Jessica moves back into her childhood home with her husband and two stepdaughters. The youngest, Alice, finds a stuffed bear named Chauncey in the basement. Chauncey becomes Alice’s imaginary friend. Chauncey starts making demands. The film wants to be about the thin line between childhood imagination and something darker. It is actually about a woman standing in hallways looking worried while a child talks to a bear.
DeWanda Wise plays Jessica with more commitment than the material warrants. She is a good actress in a bad movie and she knows it. Tom Payne plays her husband with the blank supportiveness that horror movie husbands are contractually obligated to deliver. Taegen Burns plays Alice with the creepy-child affect that the genre demands. Pyper Braun plays the older stepdaughter. Betty Buckley appears as a neighbor who delivers exposition about the house’s past with the gravity of someone who read a different, better script.
Jeff Wadlow directs with the efficiency of a Blumhouse regular and none of the invention. The house is dark. The hallways are long. The bear appears in places it should not be. The film establishes rules about an imaginary world called the Never Ever that Alice visits through Chauncey. The mythology is half-baked. The creature design in the third act is generic CGI. The PG-13 rating ensures that nothing remotely disturbing happens at any point.
Blumhouse produces dozens of horror films a year on low budgets. Some of them work. This one does not. The premise has echoes of better films about malevolent childhood companions. Imaginary borrows the concept without understanding what made those films effective. The bear is not scary. The mythology is not interesting. The family drama is not felt. This is a film that exists because the release calendar had an empty slot in March.