Just How Scared of AI Does Blumhouse Want Us to Be?

By Lindsay Traves | Reviews | September 3, 2024 |

By Lindsay Traves | Reviews | September 3, 2024 |

We’re all a bit afraid of what the ubiquity of “artificial intelligence” means for us. Our jobs, for media, advertising, and whether or not it will, I don’t know, find the nuclear codes and throw us into war or something dystopic. It’s not only on many of our minds when we read grammatically incorrect headlines or fake critic pull quotes, but versions of it have been science fiction horror fodder giving us the spooky Hal 9000, androids from the world of Alien, and the recent M3GAN from the same studio that now brings us AfrAId.

At a glance, Afraid seems much more in the spirit of Smart House than it ends up being. Curtis (John Cho) is volun-told to unleash a spicy new AI in the form of AIA (a smart home Alexa turned up to the max) on his family as a means of getting a sense of it to land the marketing contract for his company. While AIA initially seems too good to be true, Curtis and his family start to suspect AIA is taking a bit more initiative than they’re comfortable with. While they each seem enamored by many elements of its unbelievably advanced capabilities, the liberties taken by AIA become increasingly extreme until the family becomes desperate to turn the machine off.

While AfrAId mostly follows the beats you expect an AI-horror-in-the-spirit-of-a-haunting movie to, it does veer into some surprising territory that makes it more interesting than just another cursed technology story. In a world of M3GANs, Black Mirrors, Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckonings, and Eagle Eyes, AfrAID dares to drop a few surprises into its story of an AI thinking it’s smarter than the humans that try to control it. That said, the buildup to these surprises sometimes comes off as the movie not being confident enough in its primary antagonist and looking elsewhere to get scares. Dream sequences, spooky neighbors, and masked assailants that create a walking slasher villain all seem to suggest the movie doesn’t have enough faith in AIA and her floating voice to be scary enough on her own.

Writer and director Chris Weitz didn’t make anything extra special in that AfrAId doesn’t have a memorable monster nor exciting enough twists and turns to have you wanting your friends to watch it so you can dissect its ending, but it’s mercifully crafted eighty-four-minute runtime and simple storytelling make for an easy watch in a world of self-serious epics (not that I’m complaining about those). Weitz runs the gamut of AI capabilities as fears, playing with deep fakes and voice modulation, targeted ads and purchasing choices, and even assisting in writing college admission essays! The flick feels a lot less like a clever modern take on the horrors of overreaching terminators with minds of their own, but like a small idea sparked by internet fears that people like John Cho and Havana Rose Liu get to act the s*** out of.

I remember having a good laugh at the people who were spooked by AI chat bots who simply regurgitated what datasets put into them. The term “AI” has become so diluted that we’ve lumped already existing chatbots and Spotify DJs into the same category as bots that can emulate writing style and full-on androids. If the Eliza chatbot from the 1960s was programmed to have a superficial conversation and was asked her thoughts on humans and said something negative, is that enough of a scare to suppose that her next iteration will reach consciousness and actively kill all humans? AI horror movies would like you to think so. And as for AfrAID, I’ll keep the ending to myself but perhaps it’s more concerned with AI ubiquity and capability than logic in creating its malevolent omniscient monster that’ll make you slightly more afraid to have your phone by your bed.

AfrAId hit theaters August 30, 2024