[Review] Daniel Isn't Real is a Gripping Psychosexual Phantasmagoria

I was a lonely child growing up in Alaska. 

I never had an imaginary friend, but the mix of the Alaskan wilderness, coupled with introversion and a revolving door of kids whose parents would cycle through a tour and leave, meant I spent a lot of time in a fantasy world of my own creation. I had an overactive imagination. My favorite toy was this wooden Ren Faire sword that I’d carry everywhere.

I’m sure from the outside, it looked weird. This nerdy kid, shouting and swinging his sword wildly at the empty air. Feint. Parry. Thrust. But, in my mind, I was fighting battles against demonic forces and dragons and orcs. If the battles got really harried, I’d toss a bolt of lightning. So I understood the allure of the imaginary best friend at the center of Daniel Isn’t Real. 

The story definitely doesn’t ease us in as it opens with a staccato burst of gunfire in a small diner. It immediately stuns and shocks with the sudden burst of unprovoked violence and that unsettled tone continues throughout the film. Before we can even understand what’s happening or why it’s happening, we meet eight year old Luke (Griffin Robert Faulkner), who is forced to watch the rapidly imploding relationship between his mother and father. 

They are fighting over the fact Luke’s mother (Mary Stuart Masterson) refuses to take her medication and, after whispering to his stuffed animal that “it’ll be okay,” he leaves the house and stumbles upon the aftermath of the diner shooting. Frozen in place, he stares at the bullet-ridden corpse of the shooter before a new kid named Daniel (Nathan Reid) distracts him by saying, “Do you want to go play?” 

Daniel seems slightly older and mature, exuding a timeless confidence and charm that seems out of place in a child. They become immediate best friends, even when it becomes clear that Daniel…well, isn’t real. But the imaginary Daniel has an edge to him and, more concerning, an independence that belies his true nature. And after he convinces Luke to do something life-threatening, Claire forces Luke to “lock” Daniel up in his grandmother’s old dollhouse. 

Cut to ten years later. 

Luke (now played by Miles Robbins) is a socially anxious college student who probably listens to indie hipster music while pining for more MCR (same, tbh) and has that kind of floppy hair that makes me swoon. Claire, now divorced and still struggling with her mental illness, is off her medication and her home is as cluttered as her mind. Notes are strewn across the floor and taped to the wall and every reflective surface has been scratched to hell because she didn’t like what she saw. What Luke sees is troubling, but even more so because he’s currently at the age when his mom was diagnosed. 

That feeling isn’t helped when, at a club, the strobe lights trigger an epileptic-like episode. The people on the dance floor suddenly look like they belong in Silent Hill or Jacob’s Ladder and Luke freaks out. He goes to see the school psychiatrist Dr. Braun (Chukwudi Iwujui) and ends up opening up about Daniel. Dr. Braun’s advice is that Luke needs to confront his past which...is probably the worst advice a psychiatrist can recommend in a horror movie.

So Luke unlocks the doll house and later that night, he’s awakened by his mom smashing glass. She locks herself in the bathroom with a pair of scissors and when Luke finally breaks in, there’s an adult Daniel (Patrick Schwarzenegger), sitting naked in the bathtub calmly surveying the suicidal Claire. does. With cold precision that brings to mind Patrick Bateman, Daniel calmly walks Luke through saving his mother from herself. Afterwards, while Luke has sunken to the floor in distress, Daniel kneels down next to him and, looking at him with a cool detachment says, “She’s gonna get through this. So are you.”

And just like that, Luke’s best friend is back, coaching him to meet girls by doling out advice like “be vulnerable” and “insist.” He slowly inserts his way back into Luke’s life as a type of coping mechanism. But, as they say, with friends like Daniel, who needs enemies? Because before long, Daniel’s raging id starts to take over Luke’s life and pushes him on a downward spiral of violence and horror.

Oh. And homoeroticism.

Based on the novel In This Way I Was Saved by Brian DeLeeuw (who co-wrote the script), Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Daniel Isn’t Real is a tremendous piece of paranoia-fueled horror that operates on a number of levels. On the surface, it’s a story about an imaginary friend who might be more supernatural than make-believe.

Adam crafts Luke’s descent with flourishes of Lynchian madness and an almost psychosexual level of paranoia. There’s no denying it: Daniel is hot in that cold way a sociopath who knows he’s sexy is. And the way he interacts with Luke is almost flirtatious. To help Luke during a math test, Daniel does a slow striptease and points to math equations written all over his body. His back muscles flex. His arms strain in athletic poses. He points to his shoulders. To the crook of his elbow. Then he looks at Luke and wiggles his eyebrows, a coy smile curling his lips. 

While we’re not operating on the same campy (sub)textual level as, say, Freddy’s Revenge, the relationship between Luke and Daniel reminded me completely of Jesse and Freddy. Patrick imbues Daniel with a confident swagger and his costuming is glam god realness as he struts in outfits that’d make Luke Spiller jealous. As the line blurs between Daniel and Luke, Mortimer pushes the theme by introducing body horror as the merger of sex and violence becomes more pronounced. 

But the film also digs into the idea of mental illness and flirts with the idea of generational trauma and inherited mental illness that worked so well in Hereditary. Luke is constantly faced with the idea that he might be at the onset of schizophrenia, the same illness plaguing his mother. It’s here that the film finds its emotional core because, by placing us in Luke’s shoes, we’re also worried that this powerful friend might just be an inherited disease starting to show.

Films that deal with mental illness can often be exploitative, but Mortimer grounds his narrative by focusing on Claire’s own struggle with schizophrenia. It depicts her illness with seriousness and thoughtful sincerity that really struck me. By pairing Claire’s mental illness with Luke’s obsessive desire to understand it, the narrative sidesteps any of the more genre-specific tropes that are old hat by now.

Adam Egypt Mortimer’s influences come in strong as it hurtles toward the climax. It brings to mind Lynch, of course, but also Clive Barker…some of the hellish places the narrative goes would bring a smile to a cenobite’s face. It’s here that the editing by Brett W. Bachman comes to life, mixing a gothic horror aesthetic with the real world as sequences set in two different places melds together. It’s edited to perfection, helped along by an orgiastic soundtrack thumping in the background. Clark’s score mixes angelic choirs with industrial noises to create a discordant tension that complements the hellish nightmare on screen.

I loved this movie. It made the news recently that Adam would like to make an A Nightmare on Elm Street movie and I think Daniel Isn’t Real is the perfect calling card. Highly recommended.