In the new family comedy “IF,” Ryan Reynolds plays a frazzled matchmaker who, with help from a young girl (Cailey Fleming), unites humans with imaginary friends.
John Krasinski, who wrote and directed the film, said the idea took shape as he watched his daughters’ lights dim during the pandemic.
“They were playing fewer and fewer imaginary games and I could see they were letting the fears of the real world in and I thought, this is the definition of growing up,” he explained in an email.
He said he decided to make the movie, now in theaters, to show his kids that the “magical world they’ve created, that place of such joy and hope and magic, exists. And you can always go back.”
Krasinski isn’t alone in bringing imaginary friendships to life this year. “IF” is one of five new movies that explore imaginary friends, in a variety of genres: supernatural horror (“Imaginary”), adult comedy (“Ricky Stanicky”), children’s animated fantasy (“The Imaginary”) and documentary (“My Secret Country”).
Why the convergence? Marjorie Taylor, professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon and an expert on imaginary friends, wasn’t sure. But she said she wasn’t surprised, considering that pretend friends, as she calls them, have long been artistic catnip.
“Imaginary friends are fascinating for people who write fiction because they are great vehicles for storytelling” about feelings and fears, said Taylor, whose book “Imaginary Friends and the People Who Create Them,” coauthored in a new expanded edition with Naomi R. Aguiar, comes out this fall.
Imaginary friends can be purely for entertainment, but they can also mirror difficult emotions and stages in a child’s life. If a family member is sick, a child’s imaginary friend may get sick too, a way to help navigate sadness and uncertainty. An imaginary friend can be a child or an adult, an animal or a fanciful creature or, as in the popular comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” a stuffed animal.
Research by Taylor and colleagues showed that as many as 65 percent of children have interacted with personified objects or invisible friends by the time they are 7. Some pretend friends are retained much longer.
Imaginary friends are considered ageless in both “IF” and “The Imaginary,” directed by Yoshiyuki Momose and coming to Netflix on July 5. Both films give imaginary friends their own points of view, and both feature young girls as protagonists. Both also focus on how memories of imaginary friends — or “imaginaries,” as they’re called in “The Imaginary” — are what keep them alive as people age and become less needful of created worlds.
Yoshiaki Nishimura, the producer of “The Imaginary,” put it this way in an email: “Imaginary friends are not the only beings that we trust and love very much as children, but forget as adults. I don’t remember the faces or names of my kindergarten and elementary school teachers, but they certainly helped me, supported and guided me, and are a part of my life.”
Imaginary friends have long fueled the horror genre, where unseen beings possess bodies and minds to all kinds of evil ends, a manifestation of and metaphor for mental illness. “Imaginary,” now on demand, uses the horror convention of a possessed toy — in this case a teddy bear named Chauncey — to explore the dark side of imaginary friendships.
Jeff Wadlow, who directed the film, said what’s sinister about a cuddly doll who does bad things is that it’s uniquely macabre but also tenderly familiar.
Chauncey “had a Paddington look to him but at the same time he’s unsettling,” he said. “His eyes and ears create an unease. But people love him.”
Not all horror movie imaginary friends are pretend, though: In “Psycho,” Norman Bates had an imaginary friend, and she turned a shower into a blood bath.
Adults don’t have to be mentally unstable to have imaginary friends. Taylor said the author Agatha Christie and the choreographer Paul Taylor have talked about having unseen companions who were a source of support and inspiration throughout their lives. Then again, imaginary friends can be socially devitalizing; many Americans have imaginary beliefs about who the president is, or what vaccines do to bodies.
In “Ricky Stanicky” (streaming on Amazon Prime Video), the imaginary friend is a grown man made up by three friends — played by Zac Efron, Andrew Santino and Jermaine Fowler — who pretend to call on him as cover when they want to lie about their whereabouts. When one of their duplicitous plans starts to crack, they hire an actor (John Cena) to make Ricky real.
Peter Farrelly, the film’s director and one of six people credited with the screenplay, said his comedy is rooted in very adult concerns about what happens “when your lies come alive.”
“You create this lie where you cover all the time and this person protects you, like, this guy bought the beer or this guy bought the weed, and you get out of trouble,” said Farrelly, the director of the Oscar-winning “Green Book.” If you’re getting good things from lying, he said, “it’s hard to stop. But one day you have to say, I am a liar. It’s part of growing up: telling the truth.”
Are we in an imaginary friend golden age? Marlo McKenzie, the director of “My Secret Country” — in which animation makes real children’s imaginary friends come to life — sure hopes so. McKenzie said her film, which debuts on June 2 at the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, was born in part by having worked at a homeless youth shelter where many children with backgrounds of abuse “weren’t able to imagine a world where they were loved.”
“Imagination,” she said, “is way more important than we realize.”
Krasinski also finds this to be true. If it wasn’t for Sam Brace, his childhood imaginary friend, “IF” may never have been made.
“We had a video store about a half mile away from our house,” he wrote. “Sam and I would walk to pick out a movie and along the way live through those movies. I have often wondered if it was actually Sam who directed this movie.”
