At the Overlook Film Festival this year, two films centered around the concept of an imaginary friend gone wrong; Daniel Isn’t Real and Z. Though both also tied the imaginary friend to mental illness, or at least the question of it, they’re polar opposites in execution and narrative direction. In Z, director Brandon Christensen’s follow up to Still/Born, the ultimate goal is to scare you silly. Z offers up a fairly familiar premise, but it does deliver on atmosphere, chills, and a couple of memorable moments that had the audience gasping.
The Parsons family is your average suburban middle-class family; stay at home mom Elizabeth (Final Destination 2’s Keegan Connor Tracy) lovingly dotes on her son Joshua (Jett Klyne) while bearing the emotional weight of her mother’s terminal illness, and her husband Kevin (Sean Rogerson of Grave Encounters, Still/Born) is the family provider, therefore less present. Their routine of school homework, play dates, and familial obligations is established to further cement their normalcy. It’s broken when Joshua suddenly starts setting food out at every meal for his new imaginary friend, including waking up in the middle of the night to make him sandwiches with a large kitchen knife, and getting far too attached to his invisible buddy named Z. When Elizabeth discovers that all of his former playmates, and their parents, want nothing to do with Josh at all anymore, she realizes something is very wrong with her son.
Don’t worry, this isn’t another creepy kid tale. Christensen wisely drops that angle in favor of setting up something far more terrifying; what if a child’s imaginary friend was real? It’s already a spooky concept on paper, but its Christensen’s strong grasp of creating atmosphere and effective scares that really sells it. Creating Z as a mostly unseen Boogeyman is a brilliant move not just for giving the film an eerie haunted house quality, but it takes the pressure off of Klyne to sell the malevolence all on his own youthful shoulders. Unnerving child drawings of what Z actually looks like, nighttime bumps in the night, childhood toys rendered nightmarish, and a bathtub scene from hell make for goosebumps-inducing horror. But nothing sells just how dangerous Z really is like one shocking moment so unexpected and brutal that it elicited visible and verbal reactions from the audience.
While Z nails its horror, it’s weakest in story and character work. Christensen co-wrote the screenplay with Colin Minihan (Grave Encounters, Still/Born, What Keeps You Alive), and though they’ve written an intriguing villain, their protagonists tend fall into some disappointing clichés. The biggest of which is the relationship between Kevin and Elizabeth. Because Kevin is typically away at work, when we do see him, he’s usually at odds with his wife over matters in dealing with their son. Though there’s an honestly in parents fighting over differences in parenting, Kevin falls into the typical husband role in horror that dismisses his wife’s concerns at every possible turn. He thinks she’s overreacting and very likely crazy, straight off the bat. Then there’s poor Stephen McHattie (Pontypool, Come to Daddy), a talented actor relegated to the role of exposition delivering doctor/therapist. The plot also circles around mental illness without ever addressing it fully, which might prove problematic for some.
In terms of plot, Z feels pretty standard and familiar. Based on the formulaic nature of the characters, the story goes precisely where you think it will. Yet if you’re looking for something the brings the chills, this is it. Christensen has a talent for crafting scares, and shows immense promise for greatness in genre filmmaking. He just needs a stronger story that avoids the pitfalls of standard genre tropes. But in horror, sometimes all you want is something designed to scare you silly, and Z scratches that itch.
