2024 must be the year of imaginary friends. The film IF with Ryan Reynolds is out later this year, and this weekend dropped the latest horror movie featuring the idea of the imaginary friend.

According to IMDB, “a woman returns to her childhood home to discover that the imaginary friend she left behind is very real and unhappy that she abandoned him.”

Here is the thing with Imaginary. I was fully engaged in the first 2/3rds if this movie. I was invested, surprisingly so. Then, in the third act of Imaginary, everything absolutely fell off the cliff. The last third of this movie absolutely crushed the enjoyment from the first part of the film and brought this rating way down.

So what went wrong in that third act? Without talking in spoilers, the problems are varied. The movie suddenly falls into exposition. It starts to explain things and doesn’t seem to stop. SO MUCH EXPLAINING!!!! And it was multiple scenes.

Not only are they over explaining things, they are explaining things that we just saw happen, as if we were not smart enough to understand what had just happened. There was one scene in particular where once the action ended, the characters told us what we had just seen. I do not like to think the movie thinks I am too dumb to understand what I am watching. This sure as hell is not Dune 2.

The third act became ridiculous. The story was convoluted and then everything had to be explained. Things happened that did not make sense. The special effects were okay, except for the look of the bear. The monstrous bear known as Chauncey looked like a fraud Bigfoot on a poor video recording.

The acting was, at best, passable, but the writing was extremely weak and the dialogue felt wooden in a lot of times.

They used a bunch of jump scares in the film because they could not really create the type of horror that built on it normally.

I was enjoying the first two acts, despite the fact that it was a little slower. But that third act just drove the film into the ground. I went from being invested to laughing at the scenes. It has been a long time since a movie took this hard of a turn into badness for me.

1.5 stars