Imaginary Friend (2012 TV Movie)
3/10
One of Lifetime's Worst Films
9 October 2014
Warning: Spoilers
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.
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