Imaginary Friend (2012)

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This film is way too predictable. It starts out with a pretty decent premise, but the viewer figures things out very early on. From then, it's just a question of how the plot will get to the inevitable ending. A psychological thriller/suspense film --which is what this trying to be--needs a lot more development and imagination to work.The cast does give it a good shot, but needs more to work with. Ethan Embry and Paul Sorvino (In a small role) are particularly good. Lacey Chabert holds her own, too. Of course, she has several scenes requiring her to prance around in a bikini.Overall, this film falls slightly short of a recommendation.

While the acting was generally okay and the soundtrack wasn't too bad, the plot itself was terrible. It's just another movie to make imaginary friends seem like a mental illness. Lots of adults have imaginary friends, hell, I have one, and it's movies like this one, Drop Dead Fred (1991), Hide & Seek (2005) and Magic (1978) that give imaginary friends a bad rep. This film follows the basic formula for these types of movies.Emma has it all, she's an adult woman who lives a fancy high-class life as an artist but is on strict medication and is married to a kind of jerky psychiatrist. As a child she had an abusive father and created an imaginary friend, Brittany, to help her through dark times. Her loving headshrinker husband suggests medication but Emma loves Brittany and doesn't want to destroy her only friend with drugs. But is Brittany not so imaginary after all, or is there something more going on? Well, Emma is a typical Hollywood portrayal of mental illness in a person, frequently shown popping antidepressants/antipsychotics and having hallucinations that turn out to be a real person she is seeing, and her sleazy husband certainly isn't helping anything as he cheats and plots to have his wife sent off to a mental asylum forever.I wish film companies would consider their viewers more often though; I'm sure I'm not the only one who has gone through something traumatic and dealt with it differently than most. I created Syd my imaginary friend when I was in grade 5 and he's been around for years. When my psychiatrist found out I thought for sure he'd tell me to get rid of Syd or start popping pills, but he said that many fiction novelists end up with imaginary friends or keep them from childhood, and that as long as Syd isn't dangerous and doesn't pose any threat he's a great support mechanism so long as I can tell the difference between imagination and reality, which I can. I don't like how the film portrayed Emma as "instant nutcase" for having an imaginary friend, nor do I like how they portrayed the psychiatrist husband as a cheating, stuck-up know-it-all who automatically wants his own wife sent away, even though he was scheming with his mistress in the film.This film is the perfect example of why Lifetime should stick to their true crime films and teen dramas. I don't recommend watching this at all, it's pretty pathetic.

This was a great thriller. I loved the twists. I totally thought the twist when Brittany turned out to be real was amazing. It shocked me. It was also cool that Emma, played by Lacey Chabert, knew what her husband was up to and got even with him in the end. The acting was really good - especially Lacey. She had such a great intensity. Ethan Embry was good as her cheating husband. He plays slimy really nicely. Overall, it's great to see Lifetime do a smarter thriller. You really have to watch this one to get it. I want to see it again as I'm sure I missed some of the hints along the way. This movie isn't so cookie cutter like some of the other ones that Lifetime does.

I'm giving it all away so if you don't want the entire thing spoiled, don't read this review!In a nutshell:Little girl from an abusive, but rich family; grows up to be a fragile yet schizophrenic artist with huge trust fund and a husband just as rotten as her father. He tries to drive her crazier than she already is by having his mistress pose as her childhood hallucination imaginary friend to have her committed; so that he and the mistress can live together in comfort off of artist's trust fund. Schizophrenic artist figures it out, and with the help of said mistress manages to turn the tables on him; and he ends up taking a ride in the Twinkie Truck instead.The acting is pretty good, even if the character creation is mediocre and predictable at best. Anyone with a handful of brain cells can figure out where the movie is going about a third of the way through. Not a bad movie overall, but like most flicks that air on Lifetime; it is too contrived to be genuinely engaging.