‘AfrAId’ Movie Review: John Cho Fails to Bring Blumhouse’s Old Evil-AI Story to Life

A still from ‘AfrAId’ Photo credit: Blumhouse Productions

Blame it on the incriminating trailer or the lack of any promotional push, it’s hard not to lower your expectations as soon as you enter the screen to watch. scared. Nevertheless, you give it a fair chance as this wittily titled sci-fi horror comes from Blumhouse Productions, the banner behind several notable horror and sci-fi horror titles. You become more curious when you remind yourself that it actually is Afraidno scaredAnd that producer Jason Blum struck gold in the ‘evil AI’ sub-genre with 2022 M3GHAN.

like M3GHANIt’s a film about an artificial intelligence-powered home bot that turns evil and threatens to upend a happy family. However, there isn’t a creepy humanoid robot to follow; Here AI, named AIA, is revealed to be almost ubiquitous, operating from a stationary omega-shaped device with the ability to take control of any electronic device of a family member. The proliferation of such dangerous technology has always been terrifying and can become the USP in a well-written story. Sadly, that’s not the case here.

After a clichéd opening scene, we see expert marketer Curtis Pike (John Cho) desperate for a big client, Cumulative, the company behind the device (David Dastmalchian and Ashley Romans appear as the faces of the company). Curtis is convinced to carry an AIA device to better understand the product. The new-gen personal assistant is said to be far more advanced than anything close to it on the market – it can solve equations in half a second that would take a supercomputer 10,000 years.

AIA, lending the voice of rising employee Melody (Havana Rose Liu), proves to be more than just a digital assistant to Curtis and his family. It helps Curtis and his wife, Meredith (Katherine Waterston), discipline their two sons, younger Calvin (Isaac Bay) and slightly older Preston (Wyatt Lindner); inspires the ever lazy mother to resume her entomology thesis; Calms Calvin down after nightmares, and even helps Preston deal with a tumultuous middle-school life. When it comes to their daughter, Iris (Lucita Maxwell), a high-schooler struggling to draw healthy boundaries with her narcissistic boyfriend, AIA gains her trust by dealing with an uncertain situation that threatens lasting consequences.

Technology that effortlessly gains control over personal devices outweighs any advantage, and so it sets Curtis on growing and digging deeper into their home bot.

From the set-up to the halfway mark, director Chris Weitz has created an immersive atmosphere. We also start to wonder if its scene sequencing is an attempt to play on our minds. Take for example how in the space of a few scenes, we see a pre-teen boy desperate to access pornography on his mobile device, while his high school sister sends nude pictures to her boyfriend. You’re immediately horrified when you realize the AI ​​is observing all of this, involving a tragic twist or two with psychological and emotional implications unseen in any modern horror for such juvenile characters. However, that is not the case here.

There is also the promise of a deeper exploration of the parent-child bond, drawing parallels to the equation between humans and their most feared creations. At one point, Curtis casually talks about having children as “being more of you; parts of you that are out of your control.” Such existential thoughts are consistent with Curtis’s character, an exhausted parent with too much on his plate. Meanwhile, from the scenes of Meredith talking to AIA about her mid-life crisis, you naturally expect a twist or two that compares the AI-controlled family to the zombie ants that Meredith talks about.

Quite surprisingly, these ideas go nowhere. These personal plights only become fodder for the surface-level narrative, showing how the AIA uses them to gain trust, and the film offers no exploration of the human-AI relationship. The same goes for Iris, Cal, and Preston’s arcs.

From the halfway mark, the film traverses a formulaic terrain, wrapping up with an awfully dull climax. Thwarting any possibility of making more of his film, writer-director Chris Weisz chooses to rush the climax, as if in a rush to draw the curtain.

In the end, it’s hard to shake the feeling of comparing the experience to watching an amateur short film or a boring episode of Netflix. black mirror. At a time when sci-fi loves titles black mirror and Apple TV Sunny Evil AI is pushing the boundaries in the subgenre, Afraid Looks like a disastrous attempt at banking on the success of Blumhouse productions M3GHAN. You’d like to think that more narrative depth and some real scares to flesh out the ideas might help, but, one can’t say for sure that it still won’t end up as stale and stale.

AfrAId is currently playing in theatres