Only a year after the grand success of M3GAN, we have our next entry in the killer kid toys entry from Blumhouse. Imaginary (2024), directed by Jeff Wadlow, the new horror film on the block, takes a cue from the Gerard Johnstone film and uses its squishy toy to offer some creepy little chills. There are enough twists and turns in the film to satiate a viewer, and the ending of Imaginary may come off as a shock and confuse audiences who do not pay attention to every detail.
In the following article, I plan to take a detailed look at the film and what everything that leads up to its supernatural ending means. Please be aware that the post will be full of spoilers.
What is Imaginary (2024) about?
In short, the film is about a middle-aged woman who moves into her old home with her partner and his two daughters. When the youngest one starts experiencing strange happenings with her new-found toy friend ‘Chauncey Bear,’ the woman is forced to look into her past and beyond the scope of her imagination.
Imaginary (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Jessica (DeWanda Wise) is a famous Children’s Book author who is working on her new book and living with her husband, Max (Tom Payne), in his apartment. Max is a musician who travels for a living and has two daughters, Alice (Piper Braun) and Taylor (Taege Burns), from his previous marriage.
Both Taylor and Alice are only getting used to Jessica being their stepmom, and Taylor’s behavior reveals that she is not fond of someone else taking her mom’s place.
The film opens with Jessica’s nightmare, in which her father is possessed and is trying to kill her by morphing into a spider. Her husband caringly suggests that they move into her dad’s old home right away instead of waiting for everything to get fixed after a few weeks.
Next, we see the family moving into the home, with Jessica trying her best to bond with both Taylor and Alice. While it is hard for her to get through Taylor’s thick, pent-up teenage skull, she is able to convince Alice that she genuinely cares.
What does Alice find in the basement?
On one day, Jessica and Alice are playing hide-and-seek. The little girl goes into the basement of the house and discovers an abandoned door with a rusty old teddy bear inside. She names him Chauncey The Bear, and the two of them become inseparable.
Jessica is taken aback by Alice’s sudden interest in the Bear with their bonding sessions getting scars, but she doesn’t pay much heed to it initially, thinking that all kids are more loving for the imaginary friends they have. However, one day, Jessica finds a scavenger hunt list that Alice’s new friend has asked her to complete, which also includes hurting herself. While Jessica is able to save Alice in the nick of time from hurting her hand on a sharp nail, she realizes that everything is not right with Alice and she needs help.
Is Chauncey the Bear real?
The next day, she calls up Alice’s old child therapist, who soon discovers that Alice is voicing for her imaginary friends. Up until this point, the viewers and Jessica thought that a teddy bear that we now know as Chauncey was present all this time, but after the session ends abruptly, both Jessica and the viewers realize that Chauncey that Bear is, in fact, ‘imaginary’ and the version we have been seeing thus far has been a manifestation of Jessica and possibly Alice’s mind.
When she sits down with Alice’s Therapist, the term Never-Ever comes up. This, along with the revelation from her father about her getting lost in her childhood, prompts her to go through her old stuff and discover the Never-Ever doorway that she drew. She then searches deeply and comes to the conclusion that Chauncey The Bear (or CB as his father told her on the last visit) are the same imaginary friends. The Bear has now chosen Alice as her new host child.
While Jessica and Taylor are trying to figure out what’s going on with Alice after putting her to sleep, Chauncey manipulates Alice again, plodding her to open the basement doorway that has been locked till now.
When they are unable to find Alice in the house, they search frantically inside and outside. This is when Jessica makes two plus two and tells Taylor that Chaucey is responsible for Alice’s disappearance, much like her own disappearance in her childhood. Taylor is angry at Jessica making up stories and decides to look for Alice on her own.
What does Gloria tell Taylor about the Never-Ever?
This is where she meets Gloria (Betty Buckley), the creepy old lady who came up to the house earlier, claiming to have babysat Jessica when she was a child. Gloria takes Taylor to her house and tells her that Chauncey Bear, after being abandoned by Jessica in her childhood, has turned into a vengeful spirit that wishes to capture kids for their ‘imaginative powers.’ She tells her that she has dedicated her life to understanding this phenomenon and cites numerous examples of such spirit in various mythologies (although this part of the film feels extremely convoluted because there isn’t much ground on which to base these claims).
The two of them come to the conclusion that since Jessica left CB, he is now after Alice to first satiate his hunger and then take vengeance against Jessica for doing what she did to him back then. She tells her these imaginary friends’ eventual aim is to lure these kids into doing things for them so that they can take them away to a ‘secret place.’ Gloria claims that since Alice is missing, it’s possible that Chauncey has managed to do what he wanted to and that Alice is now in the secret place.
What does Jessica realize about her father?
While Gloria uses cinematic exposition to explain the plot of how these imaginary friends thirst for a child’s imagination, feeding on their trauma, Jessica is in her childhood room trying to complete some of the faded drawings on the wall—one of which is quite similar to the scavenger hunt list that Alice had.
This is where Jessica also realizes that her father had not abandoned her. When she was forced into the secret place by Chauncey, formerly called Never-Ever, he went after the spirit and rescued Jessica from there. However, while doing so and before he could close the portal, her father got in contact with the entities, forever making him delirious.
Now, the question arises: If Alice is in this place called Never-Ever, how are these three—Jessica, Gloria, and Taylor— going to rescue her?
How does Jessica open the portal door to the Never-Ever?
The answer lies in the scavenger hunt list. Since Jessica realizes that Alice’s list is quite similar to the one she made as a child, they conclude that doing those things opens up the portal to the Never-Ever. It’s like summoning a spirit, but this time, the spirit is a teddy bear after Alice’s imagination and life.
Through the ritual, which includes Jessica hurting herself, the portal to Never-Ever opens, and the three of them enter. They can hear a lot of children and their imaginations running rampant in this huge structure.
The three of them are only trying to figure out this place when we realize that Gloria is not trying to help Jessica and Taylor. In fact, her plan was to guide and get them to the Never-Ever because after Jessica left during her childhood, Gloria fell prey to the Imaginary creatures because of her loneliness.
Jessica, who had put a screwdriver at the portal door, is shocked to see Gloria turning on them and closing the portal, which was their only way to escape from there. Now, Gloria, who had been expecting to be rewarded with a forever vacay in the Never-Ever, gets killed off instantly.
Imaginary (2024) Movie Ending, Explained:
Are Jessica and the girls forever trapped in the Never-Ever?
After trying and failing multiple times, Taylor and Jessica are finally able to locate Alice in the maze-like structure. Alice is in a room full of gifts, her favorite things, and even a projection of her mother. However, when Jessica and Taylor get there, Jessica convinces Alice that they need to go away from there, and (thankfully) the little girl agrees.
Chauncey – who is now a huge ass bear hungry for their flesh and the girl’s mother’s projection tries to corner them with no way to escape. However, Jessica uses her intelligence and starts drawing on the wall of the room, supposedly forming a new portal from which they escape.
The ending of Imaginary shows all three of them escaping, and we find them all happy and secure when meeting Jessica’s father in the hospital. All seems okay for a second, but then Jessica notices the burnt scar on Alice’s hand is gone and realizes that she is still in the simulation.
The imaginary beings want her to stay in the Never-Ever forever and promise that none of her family members will be harmed if she agrees.
Jessica thinks she is trapped there forever and agrees to this deal, but Taylor, with her newfound appreciation for Jessica as their mother, breaks into the illusion, and this time, Jessica is able to escape from the Never-Ever. Only this time, while they are trying to close the portal, they set fire to the monstrous entity behind them. The fire grows bigger, eventually consuming the entire house.
The final moments of the film see Alice, Jessica, and Taylor trying to check into a hotel, where they are scared by the presence of another teddy bear belonging to a kid who claims that his imaginary friend is real.
This conclusion shows us that the imaginary entities are still out at large, only that Jessica and the girls now know how to escape them.
Imaginary (2024) Movie Themes Explained:
Collective Trauma:
At its center, the horrors in Imaginary are a bit too personal, both for Jessica and for Alice. We have come to understand Trauma with multiple movies basing their plots around it. However, very few movies actually dwell on the collective trauma that is felt by people and how it connects them in some strange sort of way.
Both Jessica and Alice in the film suffer from the trauma that they faced in their respective childhood. The scar on Alice’s hand and the one that Jessica scribbles on her books are quite the same. This is why Chauncey Bear decides to target Alice because of the similarities that make her as vulnerable as Jessica was in her childhood.
Abandonment:
The main theme that runs through the film is a sense of abandonment.
Jessica draws, has nightmares, and is unable to provide the kind of warmth her stepdaughters need due to her constant self-reflexiveness about being abandoned by her father during her childhood.
Similarly, Alice and Taylor feel abandoned by their mother, and they are unable to take Jessica as their stepmother because they feel that she will also turn up like her in the long run.
However, the biggest sense of abandonment felt by a character here is that of Chauncey Bear. The film doubles down on the fact that since Jessica abandoned it so many years ago, it has been unable to grow because of a lack of imaginative prowess that people give to their imaginary friends. So, Chauncey chooses to target Alice both as a way to grow again with the help of her imagination and as a way to get revenge on Jessica for abandoning it.
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