Blumhouse made almost $300 million last fall with the sinister bear-fronted Five Nights at Freddy’s, and they returned to theaters on Oscars weekend with another bear in mind. 

The would-be frightfest Imaginary tries to wring creeps out of a stuffed teddy bear named Chauncey, who I fear will not go down in the annals of anthropomorphic animals out for blood. On the other hand, a teddy may actually be a perfect mascot for a horror movie this limp, familiar, and full of stuffing. 

After heading up back-to-back bro beatdowns Never Back Down and Kick-Ass 2, director Jeff Wadlow has more recently been behind Blumhouse-backed duds like Truth or Dare and Fantasy Island. Sadly, Imaginary is just more of the same.

The film tells the story of children’s book illustrator Jessica (DeWanda Wise) working hard to form meaningful relationships with her stepdaughters Taylor (Taegen Burns) and Alice (Pyper Braun). With her musician husband Max (Tom Payne) on tour, Jessica moves the girls into her childhood home after her father’s move to an assisted living facility. It’s there that Alice begins communing with an imaginary friend through a teddy bear she calls Chauncey, who seems to be helping her cope with the living situation. But Jessica becomes concerned when Chauncey seems to command Alice to gather items in a scavenger hunt that gradually takes a turn toward disturbing. Alice’s dark imagination eventually ties into dark secrets from Jessica’s childhood that will take a collective journey through the metaphysical to resolve.

From its confused and confusing cold open, Imaginary borrows liberally from specific story beats of better horror fare from Poltergeist to It. In fact, Shudder put out a similarly plotted horror film a few years back called Z about a child’s imaginary friend that was by no means a masterpiece but is The Shining by comparison to Imaginary. 

For much of its running time, this movie labors under the misapprehension that a glum-looking stuffed bear could be scary. After some time, it teases shots of the bear moving on its own but, predictably, that’s still not frightening. Later on, it tries to pull out the big guns with a CGI bear creature that’s much larger than a normal teddy but the effects aren’t rendered coherently and thus, the moments of supposed terror simply don’t land. There’s also a twist involving the actual presence of the bear that’s so wrongheaded that I’m tempted to spoil it here but I won’t.

Wise does her best with the only character in the movie who seems to have any agency or plausible motivation, but she can’t come close to solving Imaginary’s myriad of problems. I’m not exactly sure why Payne is billed so high when he’s in the film for a total of maybe 10 minutes, and I certainly don’t know what the point of having his character was in the first place. As for the young actresses Burns and Braun, I’m sure they’re doing their best. but their performances are downright awkward and amateurish. Veteran actress Betty Buckley also turns up as a leering next-door neighbor that the movie can’t determine if it wants to take seriously as an antagonistic threat or comedically as generational juxtaposition for the young stepdaughters. I laughed at several interactions she had with the kids, although I’m not sure Wadlow intended the lines to have humor in them.

There’s all sorts of ponderous dialogue scattered throughout Imaginary that’s made all the more head-scratching when you realize it took a trio of credited screenwriters to come up with it. 

This film is distributed by Lionsgate, but Bing Bong, the imaginary friend character from Disney’s Inside Out, is name-checked half a dozen times at various points. I could understand maybe once or twice for a reference point that Alice might use to tie to Chauncey, but the reprises made me half-suspect the filmmakers are on the take from the House of Mouse. 

The movie’s biggest issue is that it takes itself far too seriously. I’m not suggesting strained comic relief, but fellow Blumhouse production M3GAN was also about a killer doll but had a much more dialed-in mix of camp and fun. 

Imaginary is an unbearable horror effort that ironically lacks any sense of imagination.

New movies coming to theaters this weekend

• Arthur the King, starring Mark Wahlberg and Simu Liu, is an adventure following a group of mountain climbers who compete in an endurance race and meet a surviving stray dog who becomes part of the team during their trek.
• The American Society of Magical Negroes, starring Justice Smith and David Alan Grier, is a satire about a young Black man who is recruited into a magical society of African Americans to follow their lifelong cause: to make the lives of white people easier.
• One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter, is a biographical drama depicting a young London broker who, in the months leading up to World War II, rescued more than 600 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.