AFRAID. The previews for Afraid held a little campy promise — the premise of a family cowering before its power-drunk Alexa has plenty of scary/funny potential — especially under the Blumhouse imprint. In our current climate, it shouldn't be terribly hard to sketch out an AI villain. If the Google Gemini instructions for adding glue to keep cheese from sliding off pizza don't scare you, the self-driving car wrecks, deep fakes and the extra limbs added to AI-generated images of people are enough to give us the willies. The creepiness of chatbot flirtations, an entity whose consciousness is formed of our collective internet posts (sweet Jesus) and the Silicon Valley bros spit-balling ways to turn over everything from creative endeavors to healthcare to the robots should keep us up at night (likely on our phones), too. Not to mention the tech giants collecting our voices and data behind Alexa and Siri's mild voices, a lucrative inversion of the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain, the latter having nearly unfettered power in this case.
It's not unmined territory, either. Not since the eerily calm HAL refused to open the bay doors in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) has anyone looked at so much as a microwave without a little suspicion. Since then, our relationship with technology and where we draw the borders of personhood have yielded riches artistically and ecumenically. Scaling back to AI's impact on a single family seems like a gimme, especially if a little self-awareness is allowed to bloom. Unfortunately, Afraid, despite a competent cast, fails to deliver thoughtful critique, scares or, sadly, fun.
In a bid to win a marketing contract with a pair of tech wunderkinds (David Dastmalchian in all his weirdness and Ashley Romans in Competent Woman mode), Curtis (John Cho) takes a prototype AI unit called AIA home to his family to try it out. While wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston) is skeptical, the screen-loving kids are all in, helping with chores as soon as AIA dangles rewards. Little Cal (Isaac Bae), already bargaining for more screen time, gets a nanny to read to him while mom is busy with research, Preston (Wyatt Lindner) gets a partner in crime who lifts parental guards and Iris (Lukita Maxwell) gets a social media PR consultant who gets her. Even Meredith softens as the convenience of outsourcing her to-do list lightens her load and AIA lends her a sympathetic ear/speaker. But Curtis, initially excited about the next-level assistant anticipating his family's needs, begins to wonder whether the whole thing is a scam, somehow connected to the mysterious people in the RV parked across the street or, worse, real and a little too invasively powerful. Inevitably, AIA's role in their lives escalates beyond digital Girl Friday and she begins calling the shots.
It's hard not to like Cho but listening to him describe marketing as a soulful mission tests the strength of his charms. Curtis' agonizing over ethics and devotion to his family are announced, rather than demonstrated, and the lack of chemistry between husband and wife leaves the relationship looking more like fond friends from book club. Waterston's Meredith isn't fully realized either, and when she pours herself a glass of wine and spills her guts to AIA, it earns more laughs than sympathy. (Though who can blame her for bonding with anything that actually reads her dissertation?) The young actors are all strong, and AIA's finessing of each is the most convincing element of the movie. That is until the AI's assistance handling deep-fake revenge porn by a creep at school careens into the comical. Even when things go haywire, the responses from the family and tech folk to these incidents are underwritten and two-dimensional.
Writer/director Chris Weitz, who co-wrote The Creator (2023), is no stranger to the emotional and ethical puzzles of artificial intelligence, but he seems unable to track them here. Shifting awkwardly after the first act, it seems he and his movie can't decide what it is AIA wants at first and can't make us believe it once they settle on a motivation. Tacking a tinny mini-monologue onto the ending feels as forced as the introduction of new threats and the ultimate resolution. AIA and Afraid both feel like tech launched too early, their purpose and methods being devises and troubleshot on the fly. But what keeps it from entertaining or scaring the audience is the human element, or lack thereof. The script has left the ghost out of the machine and, like an AI rendering, can't quite get the hang of real people. PG13/ 123M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill.
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