Ambiguity is something I value highly in entertainment…most of the time. It can be a refreshing way to show respect for an audience’s intelligence, it’s practically necessary in a complex story, and when utilized well, it forces a viewer to truly analyze what they’ve just seen. To me, the greatest stories are ones that draw the audience in, and then manipulate their emotions through clever devices. Ambiguity is often used to disorient the viewer, making them just a little more vulnerable to whatever surprises await – something seen in horror and thrillers to set up jump scares, misdirect, or create a general sense of unease.
Conversely, ambiguity often comes across as lazy and pretentious. When a wide-release film has an ambiguous ending especially, complaints about the story’s futility are very common. General audiences sometimes feel duped, and literally or figuratively demand their money back. It may sound like I’m “chastising the uneducated masses,” but this reaction truly is understandable. Most people don’t want to walk out of a theater feeling like an idiot, or holding the suspicion that the writer was too incompetent to resolve their own plot.
After seeing Daniel Isn’t Real, I’m not even sure if there is any ambiguity in its story. Throughout, the film certainly wants us to believe that some aspects are ambiguous, but its excruciatingly lame and obvious use of metaphor makes this somewhat problematic. The film’s shaky commentary on mental illness and the associated struggles does occasionally feel insightful or at least a bit unique – until the fiftieth time the movie sideswipes you with yet another detail that could either be a clue to what’s really going on, or an egregious plot hole.
On the whole, I can’t really say Daniel Isn’t Real is a terrible movie. Its script has some serious problems, but in spite of that, it’s a fairly entertaining ride, at least it was for me. The performances are mediocre (until a certain terrible scene toward the end), and the pacing is decent enough that it’s a brisk watch. There are some fairly impressive practical effects, and it’s obvious that plenty of love went into this production. This isn’t a glowing recommendation, but if the trailer looks at all appealing to you, it’s probably worth seeing.
And with that…spoiler warning.
The film begins similarly to a favorite of mine this year (which I’d rather not spoil anywhere because it’s spectacular) by presenting us with a tranquil setting that jarringly becomes the scene of a mass shooting. Luke, a young child unable to cope with viewing the shooter’s dead body (and his parents’ messy divorce essentially caused by his father’s inability to deal with his mother’s schizophrenia), forms an imaginary friend named Daniel.
In present day, Luke is now in college, dealing with the stresses of growing up, while also tending to his severely mentally ill mother who isolates in a house that resembles the shambles of a set used for a bad period piece. Through an extended montage, we learn that when Luke was young, his imaginary friend became rather volatile. When Daniel suggests to Luke that grinding up a bottle of pills and pouring it into his mother’s smoothie will give her superpowers, almost resulting in her death, Luke’s mother becomes extremely concerned about the implications of her son’s obsession with Daniel. In an attempt to ensure this never happens again, she forces Luke to banish Daniel to a dollhouse, where he remains trapped for the next 10+ years.
Already, the plot shows signs of intrigue alongside a series of red flags that may indicate shitty writing. We’re meant to question whether or not Daniel is actually real, and evidence both for and against this will be presented again and again. In this opening, we never really see Daniel do anything to indicate that he’s not an extension of Luke’s imagination until the dollhouse banishment scene. Luke’s mother is clearly concerned that he may be experiencing symptoms similar to her own, and I’m assuming that’s supposed to be the source of her insight into how to get rid of Daniel. Still, she had no way of knowing if this ridiculous ritualistic banishment would work, and the fact that it does work immediately and lasts until Luke is in college is really suspicious – giving us our first clue that Daniel could be real. I SUPPOSE it’s common-place for parents to deal with #ImaginaryFriendProblems, but who the hell would default to a method like THIS to solve that problem? Even if this were to work in similar real-life scenarios, it would rarely be that immediate.
Present-day Luke gets into a nasty fight with his mother one evening, and decides that he once again needs the aid of his old friend to get through these tough times. I’m not sure why that’s supposed to make sense after the poisoning incident, but the screenplay needs its characters to do silly things in order to progress, I guess. He sets Daniel free by unlocking the dollhouse, but Luke notices that Daniel is a little different this time. In addition to having aged at the same rate as Luke, Daniel is also far more demanding, and doles out “advice” constantly, seemingly to manipulate Luke into living life to the fullest. He hovers around Luke, telling him what to say to get all the pretty girls into bed.
This leads to two really lame pick-ups. The first is Cassie. Luke meets her after she collides with him in a sidewalk skateboarding accident, because that’s how all lovers meet in movies. They meet again a few times by sheer plot convenience, and Luke woos her by taking Daniel’s advice. Cassie and Luke break into a library, and as they exchange taste in literature, Daniel stands behind Cassie, reading over her shoulder and reciting passages aloud for Luke to repeat in order to impress her. She paints Luke’s portrait, and when she does so, she includes a shadow meant to represent the dark side she senses within him. After gleefully destroying some of Cassie’s art together, the two have sex.
This series of interactions may be the dumbest plot thread in the film. Initially, I thought the “reading over the shoulder” scene was confirmation that Daniel really is an outside entity, because it was clearly knowledge that Luke was very unlikely to possess. Unfortunately, the film tries to be more nuanced about this and it’s treated like yet another ambiguous plot point, at least I think that’s the intention. When Luke and Cassie have sex, we see Daniel looming over them jealously. If he is a malevolent external being, then why would he be jealous? Is it because Daniel is emotionally attached to Luke, even though nearly every other scene proves otherwise, including all the advice he gave Luke to get him in bed with Cassie? If he’s a figment of Luke’s imagination, then WHY IS LUKE’S SUBCONSCIOUS JEALOUS OF LUKE HAVING SEX? This would be further evidence that Daniel is real, but these scenes give us contradictory impressions.
The second pick-up is almost as bad, but in different ways. At a party, Luke meets a girl named Sophie, and Daniel once again tries to influence him to flirt with her. He chats with her awkwardly for only a few short sentences, and then he takes her picture. She then grabs his phone and puts her number in it under the “pretense” of wanting a copy of the photo he just took, and just walks away, revealing her name as she does. It’s obvious that this is supposed to be badass behavior, but it’s an extremely quick interaction that feels remarkably unnatural and unrealistic. Luke spends the rest of the film trying NOT to fuck Sophie because he has feelings for Cassie.
Amidst all this melodrama, we see various interactions with Luke and his mother. He visits her one evening to find paper strewn all over the house, and she says that she’s looking for coded messages. She begins ranting, and has destroyed the mirrors in the house because she, “doesn’t like what [she sees].” Luke becomes concerned after discovering that she’s been cutting herself and walking on shattered glass absentmindedly, and she ends up in an inpatient psychiatric program. This subplot would be tragic, but we don’t spend enough time with Luke’s mother to really give a shit. She only exists to be another crazy person that Luke can attempt to relate to.
Remember that shooting at the beginning of the movie that didn’t need to exist at all because being a child of divorce is already enough to merit the formation of an imaginary friend as a coping mechanism? Well, we’re dredging that back up for a few minutes. Because the script needs him to, Luke visits the father of the shooter, believing that doing so could help prevent him from becoming a killer. That logic doesn’t fly with me, but fine. Luke is given drawings that the killer scribbled when he was young, and they all have a dark imaginary friend in the background. One even labels this figure as “Daniel.”
This is our main character’s big wake-up call that he may be in danger from someone other than himself – and it’s treated like the audience’s wake-up call too, in spite of all the conflicting information. The film begins setting up lore about Daniel’s existence. When Luke banished him to the dollhouse, Daniel was trapped in the hellish nightmare world that apparently exists inside, so I suppose that contributes to Daniel’s malevolence. His “true form” is also revealed to us as a body horror cliché straight out of the David Cronenberg oeuvre. Luke’s therapist is revealed to be an idiot, and conducts a weird hypnotherapy session that ends in death by Daniel. Or death by Luke. Maybe. Shortly before his murder, the therapist asks Daniel who he is, to which he replies, “A traveler.”
So that’s it. Case closed. Daniel is real, and his goal all along has been to use Luke’s body as a vessel. If this is true, then why didn’t Daniel take over Luke when he was still a child? Perhaps I should stop asking questions.
Finally, Daniel decides to enact his plan and successfully takes over Luke’s body, sending Luke to the scary dollhouse world with a giant pit inside that leads to oblivion. Daniel-possessed Luke begins doing asshole things, and what follows comes dangerously close to that part of Spiderman 3 that everyone hates in which Peter Parker goes goth and does a dance number. It doesn’t reach THAT level of stupid, but it gets awfully close.
Now that Daniel has taken over, Luke is trapped in the hellish world inside the dollhouse. Daniel (as Luke) decides to pay a visit to Cassie, seemingly to harm her for no good reason. Cassie quickly realizes that this is the “dark side” of Luke, because she glances at a picture and remembers a previous conversation that, at the time, she dismissed entirely. Daniel doesn’t take kindly to being asked to leave, and then contorts his own face until he looks like himself again. This makes it a bit more difficult to understand why Daniel needed Luke’s body in the first place, but whatever.
Luke escapes the hellish place by jumping into a bottomless pit that randomly teleports him to the same rooftop that Cassie and Daniel are fighting on. Daniel tells Luke that his own existence is more important that Luke’s, and that he’s been helping people for centuries. That’s all fine and dandy, but the moment Daniel turns his back, Luke throws a mop at him and it turns into a sword, piercing him. This results in a clearly-imaginary sword fight on a roof. Luke is essentially defeated, and then says, “If I go, you go, right?” Luke jumps off the building, and Cassie sits by his corpse as she tries very hard not to laugh. In the weird nightmare world, Daniel then jumps into oblivion, killing himself.
WHAT?
The writers chose to push the “Daniel is definitely real” angle for the whole film, and then backpedal on that in the very last shot. Not only that, but the film seems to completely forget that the nightmare world was supposed to exist inside the dollhouse. Throughout the final sequence, it seems to be visited randomly, and I can’t quite figure out what the significance of the dollhouse was in the first place. Why include that detail if it’s going to be moot by the end?
The stars of Daniel Isn’t Real may explain a bit of why some of these performances are…not so good. Luke, the lead, is played by Miles Robbins, a young Casey Affleck look-alike. A rather notorious cross-dresser, Miles is the son of actor Tim Robbins and actress Susan Sarandon. Some career highlights so far have included his role as “Boy in church” in 1995’s Dead Man Walking, and “Almost an extra” in 2018’s remake of Halloween. Miles isn’t awful in this film (until the final sequence), but he isn’t stellar either, leading me to believe that his parents had more to do with him getting the role than pure talent.
Daniel himself is played by another child of note, Patrick Schwarzenegger. Yes, that is exactly who you think it is. I’m sure it was his memorable performance in the masterpiece Grown Ups 2 that got him this role, and not daddy’s reputation. He is, at the very least, the most interesting actor in the film. He tries desperately to emulate Aubrey Plaza in Legion, but comes across more as a generic frat rapist. Then again, who’s acting?
The rest of the cast is somewhere between bad and fine. Luke’s mother seems to be grasping at Oscar gold (badly), probably in an attempt to capitalize on the success of Hereditary last year. In fact, many small aspects make this feel like Hereditary-lite. Whereas that film used grief and mental illness to great effect, this one tries to be an allegory about one character’s struggle with schizophrenia, but just can’t stick the landing.
There are several touches regarding the schizophrenia metaphors that I thought were unusually accurate for a more mainstream film. They all exist in the first 20 minutes, and it’s all downhill from there. Daniel Isn’t Real refuses to take a stance on its own title – is Daniel real? That’s left for us to judge, which would be fine if the information we had wasn’t so poorly thought-out. My frustration isn’t that we don’t know if he’s real, it’s that we have too much proof on both sides.
Portrayals of schizophrenia on film have traditionally been fairly poor. To me, whether or not I care to scrutinize the accuracy of such roles comes down to one question: Do they or do they not mention the word schizophrenia? If it’s used, then I want at least a semi-accurate portrayal. If the mental illness present is just “generic mental illness”, I care much less about the performance and the accuracy regarding what that mental illness is like in the real world.
Unfortunately, Daniel Isn’t Real drops the schizophrenia word multiple times, in spite of the fact that Luke is clearly not schizophrenic. His symptoms don’t line up in the slightest, but this is unfortunately all too normal. Norman Bates in Psycho did not have schizophrenia, but most people will identify that sort of behavior by using that term anyway, rather than Multiple Personality Disorder, or Dissociative Identity Disorder. Personal bias aside, the film’s awful “schizophrenia” metaphors begin to become really distracting very early on. When you pair this with the film’s uncertainty about whether or not Daniel is real, the implications become problematic, destroying any chance this film had at being insightful. Thematically, this director and his writer really screwed this up, and the simultaneous metaphors work against each other. It’s frustrating, and for me, it was the final straw.
I can’t really say much more about this one. Until the end, it’s fairly entertaining, but that third act is such a let-down. This should be coming out on streaming services soon, so if you need something to watch in the background while half-asleep, here you go.