Did Your Imaginary Friends Shape Who You Are Today? 'My Secret Country' Explores the Lasting Impact of Childhood Play

By Diana Helmuth | Film | June 4, 2024 |

By Diana Helmuth | Film | June 4, 2024 |

My Secret Country is a doc that is more complex than its trailer lets on. What could be easily cast as a whimsical love letter to childhood imagination is, in fact, defense of the very concept of play. Similar to what Krasinski is going for in IF, My Secret Country inspires us to appreciate the imaginary friends we left behind in childhood — but swaps out Ryan Reynolds for science and Cailey Fleming for actual children.

The doc is the brainchild of Marlo McKenzie, the same woman who brought us the documentary Carol Doda Topless at the Condor. With My Secret Country, she appears to have taken a significant shift from profiling groundbreaking sex icons to profiling literal children. But in fact, My Secret Country has been a ten-year labor of McKenzie’s, requiring keeping up with three youngsters and their relationships with their imaginary friends over the course of a decade.

McKenzie puts the kiddos right on camera, interviewing them very seriously about the names, behaviors and physical descriptions of their imaginary friends, along with the worlds they inhabit. Animation arrives on screen, bringing these fantasy characters to life (the children were consulted on the sounds and actions of their imaginary friends, to ensure they were as authentic as possible).

Interview clips from child psychology experts are deftly edited into the children’s voiceovers. They explain that while many parents are tempted to worry about their child having imaginary friends — that it is a sign of mental illness, antisocial tendencies, or worse — in fact, the opposite is true. Sixty-five percent of children have imaginary friends, and it tends to signal a child’s ability to generate creative solutions to problems, higher language skills, and increased empathy. In other words, imaginary friends are not a symptom of anything wrong but rather of something right. (This had the inadvertent effect of making me worry about the fact that I never had any imaginary friends as a child — at least none that I could remember on par with these apparent future geniuses in front of McKenzie’s camera — and that something was very wrong with me).

But the point of the doc is the opposite of shame. This is a true feel-good film. While anyone who had an imaginary friend as a child will, of course, be tempted to reminisce, reconnection with your specific imaginary friends is actually not the point. The goal of the film is to show, through a hybrid of animated narrative and interviews, that play is not incidental or trivial but the root of human creative power. “People know how to be creative, but they don’t know how to have fun,” is one quote offered by a child, placed at both the beginning and end of the film. If you find yourself often trying to be creative but rarely able to have fun with your creativity, this film is going to stir something in you.

And so it is that the movie dwells on science only enough for skeptics to take it seriously. Then it goes back to being, well, fun. The children voiceover the actions of their imaginary characters battling goblin kings for frosting and trying to save dessert from permanent extinction. It’s funny, in a “Kids Say the Darndest Things” kind of way. However, as anyone who has hung out with a five year old for more than ten minutes can tell you - talking to little kids can be fun, but also like tripsitting someone who is extremely high on mushrooms. The animation is deftly paired with the interviews, keeping the children’s stories engaging and genuinely funny, rather than confusing and meandering. It’s an excellent editorial feat.

Around an hour in, the doc has a sudden punctuation where comments from one imaginary character named “Kritik” are flashed on screen. This is the moment where the film leaps off-screen. The fourth wall breaks. Suddenly, I did not feel like I was watching a movie. I felt that this imaginary character, which was dreamed up by a random child I had never met, was speaking directly to me. I felt a visceral pinch in my abdomen like my inner child sensed it was being insulted. I imagine it would be very difficult for anyone to watch this part of the movie and not feel like they were being addressed directly and specifically. It’s a brilliant section of filmmaking by McKenzie.

Just as I started to wonder if this doc was about to turn dark, “Myoose,” Kritik’s counter-hero, appears on screen, and saves us all. Myoose is the nonverbal, elemental being who seems to exist as a solid symbol of the film’s thesis: there is nothing trivial at all about play. In fact, it saves us from the most terrifying imaginary friend on earth, one that we all still have even if we think we have outgrown such things: our inner critic.

The film then goes into a rapid, emotionally compelling montage, where the animated friends on their quest to save dessert are spliced with the career accomplishments of adults who had imaginary friends. Saving dessert, it’s suggested, is a “nonsense” fantasy of a child trying to cope with climate change headlines. It’s way to process feelings of care and powerlessness.

The animation narrative takes over the last section of the film, reminiscent of an episode of Adventure Time. I started to feel we were straying from the film’s original purpose as an actual documentary. However, the tactic put a bow on the story and allowed for a graceful ending.

I left feeling like the point of this film is more nuanced than its advertising. It’s not just that parents need not worry about having a child with an imaginary friend, nor is it just that our imaginary friends are indicative of strong psychological life skills. McKenzie really explores the nuances between the words “play,” “fun,” and “creativity” through the gaze of children themselves.

At a Q+A following the film’s premiere at SF Indiefest on June 2, Max, one of the children in the film, got on stage. He said he couldn’t actually remember Scwigee, his imaginary friend featured in the film until he saw these interviews of himself as a child. So maybe don’t panic if you can’t remember your imaginary friend, either. You are likely a victim of your own brain’s cryptomnesia; the essence of your imaginary friends has morphed into compassion, empathy, language processing, and patience. Their souls are still alive inside of you.

My Secret Country is not content to remain simply a film, but a portal for all things that validate imaginary friends and worlds. On their website, adults and children are invited to document their imaginary friends. There is also a Minecraft custom map where the story and characters in the documentary come to interactive life. You can check it out at www.mysecretcountry.com