I wanted to love this so much. Little Aussie girl, imaginary friends? Check. And it is at turns pretty interesting. A little like the office co-workers in Lars and the Real Girl having a “weird doll thing” of their own, this movie picks out the people in Kellyanne’s tight-knit community whose behaviour is really just as quirky as her insistence on the existence of the invisible Pobby and Dingan. You see her brother shake his head at their dad dowsing for a good spot to dig for opals the same way as he shakes his head at her when she speaks of her friends. There’s a guy who’s cut a copy of an invite to Princess Diana’s funeral out of the paper, “stuck it down on cardboard, put it in a frame, tourists love it.” Indeed the whole place is there for this “opal dream” that will only come true for a select enough few to make it no less ridiculous a pursuit than anything a child can come up with.

So it’s not without depth, that’s for sure. But at 85 minutes, it’s surprising, even infuriating, how much of it feels unnecessary. There’s a lot, or what feels like a lot, of people running or riding bikes around in the dark looking for Pobby and Dingan and not really getting anywhere. There’s a lot of the girl just looking a little pallid like Elliot in ET when his pal appears to be dying. It’s a dire comparison and I hate myself for making it, but there just aren’t that many imaginary friends movies lol so I’m forced: I’d still rather be watching Drop Dead Fred, to be honest, even though this movie is much closer to the aforementioned Lars and the Real Girl, almost, the more I think about it, eerily so … and though that was certainly the better movie … I cried a helluva a lot more at the end of this one.

Okay, here’s how I occasionally find myself watching movies. Sometimes I have other things to do. I have this thing that I’m pretty sure that if a movie is actually brilliant it will grab my attention whether I’m entirely focussed on it or not but the fact is, I always prefer to be entirely focussed on it to start with if possible which is why I’m pretty hopeless at getting round to actually watching the damn things sometimes.

So what happened here was new to me. I read the synopsis – ah, lovely, simple “Wrong Turn” type thriller, probably awful but possibly quite gripping like “Breakdown” or whatever. Perfect kinda movie to half-watch. About 10 minutes in, I found my gaze drawn to the screen. Because it was getting interesting? HELL no. Because I suddenly had to check if it was actually as bad as it suddenly struck me lol.

It raises itself back up almost to the level of all other entirely missable teen thrillers in the end, if that’s any consolation … but really, when the best I can say for this is that it incremented my viewcount? Make of it what you will, lol. BTW the second time I looked up in the way I would if my interest had been piqued was to basically say, “WTF, is that it?” over the ending, lol. It’s really almost enough to put me off watching these kinds of movies even as background crap ever again; that the silly announcer man voice over the end credits chose to recommend The Number 23 for next Saturday night’s viewing simultaneously says all that needs to be said about the target audience here and makes me almost glad I’ll be at work when it’s on lol.

Another kind of pointless Olsen Twins movie, but of course they’re getting hormonal here so there’s the Hot Guy^TM element. It’s set in Australia and you get the worst assault of terrible stereotype humour (four girls, count ‘em, called Sheila …) There’s a couple of fleeting laughs (“Why is everybody showing up all of a sudden?” “Hello? Big finale?”), but again, I’d feel a little wrong filling kids’ heads with this kind of thing.