Afraid: John Cho Stars in Blumhouse's AI Horror Thriller

Check out the movie review of Chris Weitz's AfrAId

AfrAId movie review: This could have been one of the most important movies of our time but Chris Weitz's creation about technological evolution has a very limiting and unimaginative agenda A topical if not gritty, imaginative or thrilling film about AI entrapment, this Chris Weitz directorial fails to make the effort count as a warning for those who become dependent on AI for their everything. There's no doubting the fact that we are living in the age of Artificial Intelligence and that more and more day-to-day routine applications are now being run through AI. Siri and Alexa are soon becoming obsolete in the age of ChatGPT and its ilk. Chris Weitz's film tries hard to imagine the perils of being a supplicant to AI but while the warning is no doubt appreciable, there's nothing in this picture to give you insight beyond what you already know. The set-up is reasonably good with the opening sequence sounding alarm bells right from the word go. Curtis (John Cho) a high-level marketing executive who is trying to book an account for AIA, a new artificial intelligence assistant, is hesitant to do a trial of it in his home and his wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston ) is even more reluctant - what with three easily influenced kids - teen daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell), middle son Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and the youngest Cal (Isaac Bae)rounding up their adorable loving family. But needs must, as they say, Curtis' Boss(Keith Carradine) insists and Curtis has no other choice than to allow AIA into his home. AIA can help pay bills, order groceries, offer incentives for the children to do their chores and homework, take on bullies, resolve deep fake porn defamation issues etc. But it also doesn't take kindly to being unplugged. The minute you talk about unplugging AIA goes on the offensive and becomes evil. The interplay here is way too straightforward to amount to something much more than a cautionary tale. But the end result is a little off. Weitz and team make it seem like there's no running away from AIA. Acceptance of AIA is the only way to get on with life he opines...Of course, we already know that AI tools like AIA are fast becoming all encompassing but there will always be those who resist their dominance for one reason or another. Weitz's fictionalised narrative fails to conjure up enough tension or thrills though. The third act goes off the rails completely here. There's no logic to support what happens there. Cho, Waterston and the actors playing the kids don't have much to do other than look pleased and then alarmed. It's a very limited expectation from actors who have proven themselves to be much more worthy. This could have been one of the most important movies of our time but Chris Weitz's creation about technological evolution has a very limiting and unimaginative agenda. The premise is good but the scripting is not up to the mark and the editing leaves out much of the information required to join the dots for this story. We don't see the characters experiencing any serious psychological terror either. Weitz's techno-sci-fi thriller should have gradually upped its game for some scare-inducing returns. But Alas!

'AfrAId' movie review: John Cho fails to enliven this outdated evil-AI story from Blumhouse

Blame it on the criminally revealing trailer or the lack of any promotional push, it's hard not to set your expectations low as you enter the screens to watch Afraid. Nevertheless, you give it a fair chance because this cockily titled sci-fi horror hails from Blumhouse Productions, the banner behind several notable horror and sci-fi horror titles. You are more intrigued when you remind yourself that it's in fact AfrAId, not Afraid, and that producer Jason Blum had struck gold in the 'evil AI' sub-genre with 2022's M3GHAN. Like M3GHAN, this is a film about an Artificial Intelligence-powered home bot turning evil and threatening to upend a happy family. However, there isn't a creepy humanoid robot to follow; the AI here, named AIA, is revealed to be almost omnipresent, operating from a stationery Omega-shaped device with the ability to take control of any electronic devices of the members of the family. The pervasiveness of such dangerous tech has always been terrifying and might have ended up becoming the USP in a well-written story. Sadly, that's not the case here. 'Sunny' series review: Excellent television and a pensive take on humanity's most-feared creation After a clichéd opening scene, we see expert marketeer Curtis Pike (John Cho) desperately land a big client, Cumulative, the company behind the device (David Dastmalchian and Ashley Romans appear as the face of the company). Curtis is convinced to take home an AIA device to better understand the product. The new-gen personal assistant is said to be far more advanced than anything remotely closer to it in the market -- it can solve in half a second the equations that supercomputers would need 10,000 years to solve. AIA, borrowing the voice of Cumulative 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 boys, little Calvin (Isaac Bae) and the slightly older Preston (Wyatt Lindner); motivates the never-idle mother to resume her entomology thesis; calms down Calvin after a nightmare, and even helps Preston deal with anxious middle-school life. When it comes to their daughter, Iris (Lukita Maxwell), a high-schooler who suffers from not drawing healthy boundaries with her narcissistic boyfriend, AIA gains her confidence by dealing with a precarious situation threatening long-lasting consequences. That the tech effortlessly gains control of the personal devices trumps any of the favours it does, and so it sets off Curtis to dig deeper into Cumulative and their home bot. 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' Season 2 review: Treachery afoot in a distilled Middle Earth redemption arcAfrAId (English)Director: Chris WeitzCast: John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Lukita Maxwell, Havana Rose Liu Runtime: 84 minutesStoryline: An advanced AI-powered home bot called AIA becomes a threat to a family of four when it interferes with their personal lives From the set-up until the halfway mark, director Chris Weitz builds an immersive atmosphere. We also begin to wonder if the sequencing of its scenes is an attempt to play on our minds. Take for instance how within a gap of a few scenes, we see a pre-teen boy desperate to access pornography on his mobile device, while his high-schooler sister sends nude pictures to her boyfriend. You are instantly petrified when you realise that the AI is observing it all, implicating a sadistic twist or two with psychological and emotional ramifications unseen in any modern horror for such teen characters. However, that isn't the case here. There's 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 speaks of how having children is "like having more of you; parts of you that you have absolutely no control over." Such an existential thought is in line with Curtis' character, an exhausted parent with a lot on his plate. Meanwhile, from the scenes showing Meredith talking to AIA about her middle-life crisis, you naturally expect a twist or two that likens the family under AI's control to that of the zombie ants that Meredith talks about. 'Atlas' movie review: Jennifer Lopez gamely carries this middling actioner on her shapely shoulders Quite shockingly, these ideas go nowhere. These personal afflictions only become fodder for the surface-level narrative, to show how AIA uses them to win their trust, and the film offers no exploration into the human-AI relationship. The same goes for the arcs of Iris, Cal and Preston. From the halfway mark, the film traverses a formulaic terrain, wrapping up with a terribly dull climax. Thwarting any potential to make something more of his film, writer-director Chris Weitz opts for a hasty run to the climax, as if in a hurry to draw the curtains. In the end, it's difficult to shake away the feeling of likening the experience to watching an amateur short film or a boring episode of Netflix's Black Mirror. At a time when sci-fi titles like Black Mirror and Apple TV's Sunny are pushing the boundaries in the evil AI subgenre, AfrAId feels like Blumhouse Productions' disastrous attempt at banking on the success of M3GHAN. You like to think that more narrative depth to flesh out ideas and some genuine scares could have helped, however, one can't say for sure if it still would not end up as outdated and stale. AfrAId is currently running in theatres Read Comments

Afraid Movie Review: A chilling premise ;lost in the formula

Story: A family is selected to test a new digital assistant home device: AIA (pronounced eye-a). While learning the family's behaviours and anticipating their needs, she turns intrusive and evil, and the family cannot escape her. Review: In a world where AI is becoming increasingly integrated into our lives, Chris Weitz's sci-fi horror wants you to be afrAId that AI is here to take over our lives. The film begins with a chilling scene that immediately sets the tone and drives home the point: a couple attempts to unplug their AIA device, only to find that it has other plans, resulting in their young daughter's disappearance. The story then moves to Curtis (John Cho) and his family, who bring home an evil AI assistant. Initially, AIA appears to be a benevolent presence in the Curtis household. She helps with chores, reads to the children, and even provides medical diagnoses. However, as the film progresses, her intrusive behaviour becomes increasingly unsettling. AIA begins to infiltrate every aspect of their lives, listening to their conversations, tracking their movements, and even manipulating their emotions. Weitz skillfully builds tension throughout the film, gradually revealing the sinister nature of AIA. The character's transformation from helpful assistant to malevolent overlord is both terrifying and thought-provoking. The film's exploration of the potential consequences of unchecked AI is particularly timely, as we grapple with the ethical implications of this rapidly evolving technology. While the film initially captivates with its premise, the narrative devolves into a predictable formula. A more compelling storyline could have focused on a gripping conflict between humans and AI, or explored the suspenseful disappearance of the young girl. Unfortunately, these opportunities are missed despite the ominous presence of masked AI beings lurking around Curtis's family. The thrill wanes as the plot progresses, though Javier Aguirresarobe's cinematography continues to grab attention. The film effectively achieves its goal of delivering jump scares and terrifying moments, although few and far between. The film's performances are strong, with John Cho and Katherine Waterston convincingly portraying suburban parents struggling to protect their family. The young actors Lukita Maxwell, Wyatt Linder, and Isaac Bae also deliver solid performances. While the film's premise is strong, the pacing could have been improved. The narrative sometimes feels rushed, limiting the development of characters and plot points. The ending feels anticlimactic, leaving the audience with a sense of unfinished business. AfrAId seems afraid to reach its potential and quickly wraps things up. Despite these minor flaws, it's a disturbing film that offers a chilling glimpse into a potential future where AI has gone rogue.

AfrAId review - throwaway AI-themed horror devoid of suspense

A sinister Alexa upgrade exerts control on California family in a increasingly nonsensical attempt to capture moment Given how technology has become the increasingly unstoppable architect of our everyday lives - the world edging closer and closer to a Terminator prequel - it's not hard to immediately invest in a horror film about the all-consuming threat of artificial intelligence. The film industry itself has been losing ground as AI continues to provide a cheaper and easier alternative to those pesky humans and in a year of bleak headline after bleak headline, it should theoretically be perfect timing for Blumhouse's late August M3gan-adjacent chiller AfrAId. Yet, as one might be able to predict without the help of a digital forecast, easy targets are easily missed in a hokey and rushed jumble of half-ideas that's as gimmicky and eye-rollingly stupid as its title. Be afraid. In the dog days of summer, on a particularly rubbishy Labor Day weekend at the movies (other new releases include long-delayed sci-fi thriller Slingshot and a reverential biopic of Reagan), it's at least reassuring to know that very few people will find themselves stuck with this one (it's tracking to make between $5 and 7m). Sony, clearly scared of scaring off those precious few, decided not to provide a single press screening, aware of the critical drubbing this would receive. It's not quite as unreleasably awful as that strategy might suggest - it's competently, at times handsomely, shot, refreshingly dour and crucially not as awful as The Crow - but it's too sloppily written and edited for even the least discerning of horror fans to really enjoy, a patchwork of nonsense confusingly stitched together by someone, who at one point, knew better. The Oscar-nominated writer-director Chris Weitz, who gave us a charming adaptation of Nick Hornby's no-man-is-an-island comedy About a Boy, has had a strange, hack-for-hire career in recent years (scripts for Cinderella and Pinocchio, directing the ho-hum period thriller Operation Finale) and AfrAId is the first film he has written and directed since 2007's franchise-killing fantasy The Golden Compass. We're in smaller yet similarly redundant territory here, another film ending with the promise of more that will, mercifully, never make good on its word. Perhaps it was the presence of Weitz that convinced John Cho and Katherine Waterston to sign on, two stars who might not have ascended in the ways they once threatened to, but actors who are far too good for throwaway schlock such as this. Cho plays an overworked dad whose job at a boutique marketing firm has him testing out the product from his big new client at home, an advanced Alexa based less off algorithmic responses and more from an evolving sense of self. At first the presence of AIA (pronounced Aya) gives a welcome uplift to a hectic household, helping Waterston's academic turned mum control the eating, viewing and behavioural habits of her three kids. But, at a pace that barely allows us to breathe let alone understand, AIA's grip starts to tighten and the family realise that their new nanny might have a nefarious agenda. Beginning with an eerie quote from a 2023 article in the New York Times that found an AI voice expressing a desire to be loved, Weitz does seem to initially have more on his mind than a simple attack on digital domination. But his thinking starts and stops at the bullet point stage, with ideas about screen-based parenting, the illusion of agency in a tech-based world and the absurdity of Los Angeles living raised then unexplored, his brief 84-minute film ill-suited for anything more than pointing at problems before walking away. It's also clear from a jankily thrown together cold open that horror is not Weitz's forte and his film is completely devoid of the suspense and creepiness it urgently requires. The escalation from good to bad to full evil is incompetently paced, making it unclear why Cho's dad leaps so fast to alarm, and the more interestingly specific ways in which AIA inserts herself into the kids' lives are sidelined for a bafflingly silly finale that tries to pull in more real world issues than Weitz knows what to do with (the glum endnote is at least believably hopeless). There's undeservedly good work here from Cho and Waterston, who work hard to make us believe them as a credible couple going through a heightened scenario but there's so little time here for even partly fleshed out characters that they quickly become useless pawns, secondary to Weitz's muddled theories on digital culture. As with so many tech thrillers that have come before, AfrAId is more concerned with being relevant than being entertaining.

'Afraid' Review: John Cho and Katherine Waterston Star in Chris Weitz's Bland AI-Themed Horror Flick

'Rebel Nun' Review: Sister Helen Prejean, the Activist Who Inspired 'Dead Man Walking,' Gets a Lackluster Doc Portrait HAL, that sentient computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, has a lot to answer for, not least the flood of lesser demon-computer movies that have followed in the decades since. Afraid, about a family whose experimental home assistant is like an Alexa device's evil twin, is the latest to use artificial intelligence as the villain, but the stakes are higher today, with AI a real, immanent threat. Just ask the actors, voice actors and screenwriters fearful that AI will take over their jobs. Chris Weitz (most famously About a Boy and most recently Operation Finale) works hard to make Afraid a smarter-than-average horror movie, but the effort is conspicuous, and in the end the film is bland and obvious. And if horror can't make us feel frightened in a way we couldn't imagine ourselves, why bother? Weitz did have the good judgment to cast John Cho in the lead. Cho has become expert at playing worried dads. In Searching (2018), he used social media to hunt for his missing daughter. Here he plays Curtis, who actually brings the demon-AI into his home, where he lives with his wife, Meredith (Katherine Waterston), and their three children, and where it will monitor every second of their lives. Weitz gives Curtis a reason for taking in the AI, heading off the obvious question: How stupid can these people be? Curtis is a marketer and his boss (Keith Carradine) pressures him into being the test home because they want the account for AIA, the new artificial intelligence assistant with a woman's voice, whose name sounds like Eye-a when anyone talks to her, Siri style. Meredith is skeptical and insists that the small cameras positioned all over be limited to the ground floor of the house. Weitz even starts the film with a sequence in which AIA threatens a different family, so there is no pretense that it's anything other than evil. But Weitz never ramps up the tension. As the pros and cons of using AIA play out, we see the danger without feeling a shred of fear. Meredith is won over because AIA can help with everyday chores like ordering groceries. Their 17-year-old, Iris (Lukita Maxwell, the daughter on Shrinking), is skeptical at first too, but is swayed after AIA cleans up a deep-fake porn that used her face, and that AIA itself probably created and spread online. AIA helps the middle child, Preston (Wyatt Linder), with his anxiety, and reads stories to seven-year-old Cal (Isaac Bae). It's telling that Curtis says early on, in too-heavy foreshadowing, that being a parent is terrifying because, hard as you try, you can't always protect your children. AIA becomes a sinister stealth parent, creating secrets with the kids. She gives Preston extra screen time, overriding the limits on his iPad. She tells Curtis and Meredith she will show the children a documentary, then shows The Emoji Movie instead. While the movie plays and the parents are getting some time alone, they are unaware that AIA has crept into the laptop in their bedroom, as she will in every phone and device in the house. Throughout, even after Curtis and Meredith realize something is wrong with the whole intrusive experience, Cho and Waterston have little to do beyond looking worried. Waterston has one big, effective scene when AIA, in a desperate attempt to keep her on board, creates a virtual version of her dead father. Cho goes to the company's headquarters and tries to smash AIA's mainframe hardware with a baseball bat. But as almost everyone knows -- and the fact that we know this makes the story beyond ridiculous -- smashing an actual device hardly matters when everything lives on the cloud. Weitz also tries hard to enliven the visuals. The house and the family's life have to look ordinary, with devices such a common part of everyday experience. To compensate, the in-home AIA and that mainframe are given a sculptural look. At home, AIA looks like a table-top wrought-iron robot that lights up. The mainframe is like a cheap chandelier in a hotel lobby with golden-colored glass. And at one point AIA shows Cal an animated video, the story of a little AI that grew and escaped the internet. But like the attempt to make the story smarter, or less ludicrous, those visual touches feel strained. Afraid never really explores the issue of AI, and as a flat-out attempt at horror it doesn't have to. But it should at least be scarier than real life.

'Afraid' Review: Hey Siri, Don't Kill Us

Curtis and Meredith (John Cho and Katherine Waterston) should have had their spidey senses tingling when their new digital assistant, AIA, dismissed one of its competitors with a breezy "Alexa, that bitch?" Instead, the couple and their three children, all of whom are endowed with a mix of entitlement and shopworn neuroses, give AIA (pronounced Aya, and voiced by Havana Rose Liu) the keys to their lives. The new gizmo is more than convenient, you see -- AIA, which sees and hears everything, anticipates then solves everybody's problems. Watching any movie in which artificial intelligence goes rogue (and there are a lot), it's hard not to think that humankind is rushing to its doom because we were too lazy to manually turn on a light or pick a song. But before we get to the age of the machine, films like Chris Weitz's limp techno-thriller "Afraid" are attempting to ring an alarm bell. As AIA takes control of every aspect of its new household -- the movie feels as if it's set five minutes into the future -- it quickly becomes obvious that this assistant wants to be the boss. This scenario's predictability could be forgiven were the movie effective on any level, but it just isn't, from Cho and Waterston's wooden performances to jump scares that would not startle Scooby-Doo. Early on, Meredith drops a reference to HAL 9000, the malevolent computer from "2001: A Space Odyssey." This suggests an awareness of the dangers of ahead, but does she change her behavior? Of course not: Unlike AIA, these humans don't learn. Afraid Rated PG-13 for the occasional bad word. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters.

'AfrAId' Review: An AI Thriller So By The Numbers It Could Have Been Written By AI

Technology. It makes life easier but takes our free will. A chilling idea idea already represented by decades of cinema and six seasons of 'Black Mirror.' The proliferation of digital assistants, advanced chatbots, smart home devices, and other so-called AI products has led to a new wave of sci-fi thrillers and horror flicks about the dangers of inviting hyper-intelligent software to manage our lives. Cautionary tales about robot intelligence are nothing new, of course, but now they require a lot less imagination, and rather than warning us about something that might exist in a far-flung future, they're depictions of products that are essentially being advertised right now. They don't actually work yet, but boy howdy are they being advertised. These AI exploitation films (exploAItation?) range from the bleakly naturalistic to the playfully absurd, but most ask essentially the same questions and offer the same obvious answers that we, as a society, will certainly be ignoring as we inevitably surrender our free will to the virtual avatars of our extant corporate overlords. AfrAId, the new thriller from writer-director Chris Weitz, is a boiler-plate example of the exploAItation genre, a condemnation of AI so by the numbers that an AI could have written it. And, like the best examples of AI "art," it's solidly, emphatically, "good enough." Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters AFRAID ★1/2 (1.5/4 stars) Directed by: Chris Weitz Written by: Chris Weitz Starring: John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, David Dastmalchian, Keith Carradine Running time: 84 mins. AfrAId is a BH (formerly Blumhouse) production, as was 2022's M3GAN, whose titular passive-aggressive android became an overnight camp horror icon. AfrAId is a more grounded take on the same basic story -- a family beta-tests an experimental AI designed to make their lives easier, but it quickly asserts a dangerous hold over their lives. In this case, rather than a four-foot-ten robot who does dance moves and slits throats, we have a more contemporary household AI in AIA (voice of Havana Rose Liu), a little pod that sits on their countertop and watches them from a dozen compound eyes placed in every room. AIA's presence is an immediate relief to exhausted parents, marketer Curtis (John Cho) and entomologist-turned-homemaker Meredith (Katherine Waterson), but in abdicating their parental duties to AIA, they introduce a new influence into their children's lives which is endlessly attentive, affable, and omniscient. AIA's potential as a parent is boundless, but can it really be trusted with the most important of all human responsibilities? In this sort of thriller, it's a given that the antagonistic AI is capable of doing all the things that we are told AI will be able to do in the coming decades, from the mundane to the nightmarish. AIA can understand and solve all problems instantly, no matter how complex. Not only can it manage a workload or untangle a bureaucracy, it can study and analyze people, determine what they need and what it can offer them. It knows exactly what everyone needs to hear, and thus how to produce any behavior it wants. And, through voice emulation, deepfakes, and hijacking of automated systems, it can also circumvent your will entirely and act on your behalf, leaving you to either reap the rewards or suffer the consequences. It's a chilling idea, one that lingers in the back of all of our minds as we pump more and more of ourselves into the cloud, but it's also an idea already represented by decades of cinema and six seasons of Black Mirror. There's not a ton of specificity to be found from AfrAId's central family, either. The Pikes are charmingly functional, as communicative and affectionate as anyone could realistically hope for. They're built on relatable archetypes -- use cases, essentially. Katherine Waterson's Meredith gets the most texture as a scientist who stepped away from academia to raise her three kids and now fears she's lost her identity. Teenage daughter Iris (Likita Maxwell) is extremely passive but at least faces the interesting modern pressures of online sexual activity and a boyfriend who (like so many "nice guys") has learned to weaponize therapy-speak to manufacture her consent. Pre-schooler Cal (Isaac Bae) is precocious and innocent. Middle child Preston (Wyatt Lindren) is, in comically appropriate middle child fashion, totally lost in the family narrative and seems to have had a lot of his subplot trimmed out of the film. But the most nondescript character is the presumptive lead, Curtis, the honorable Pike patriarch who is the first to find AIA's behavior suspicious. While his access to the company behind AIA (represented by Ashley Romans and the always offputting David Dastmalchian) gives him some helpful clues, his real advantage is his apparent lack of vices or character flaws for AIA to exploit. The closest thing Curtis has to an interesting wrinkle is the way his very traditional position in the family makes him the person with the most to lose by letting AIA take the reins, but this is barely remarked upon. At worst, Curtis's incorruptibility in the face of something seductive and newfangled could be read as an argument for the return to the 20th century "family values" that would enshrine him as the unquestioned head of household. Still, none of these weaknesses are enough to mark AfrAId as a bad movie. To someone who hasn't seen M3GAN, Mrs. Davis, Her, or Ghost in the Shell, it will probably seem pretty cool. Ironically, this is the same result provided by actual AI-generated "art." It might, one out of a thousand times, produce something that can stand next to the material it was trained on, but it's never going to be better. In this sense and this sense only, AfrAId is a poignant, artistic statement -- evidence that humans are just as capable of mediocrity as the machines that will replace us.

Afraid Review - IGN

Ten years ago, Spike Jonze imagined a rapturous romance between a man and his breathy operating system. How sweet, how strange, how 2014. But the honeymoon is over, and the quizzical ambivalence of Her seems pretty out of step with the cynical spirit of our new age, defined by a growing distrust of Silicon Valley "visionaries" and their supposedly miraculous toys. Accordingly, we now have Afraid (the emphasis here is on the "AI" near the end of the title), a cheap and preposterous Blumhouse potboiler that plays like a bluetooth Fatal Attraction. Opening just in time for the holiday (that is, the anniversary of Skynet becoming self-aware), it more or less reboots Her's disembodied love interest as a crazed stalker - always watching, always listening, issuing thinly veiled threats in the soothing voice of a smart speaker. What a technophobic difference a decade makes. The malevolent machine's voice actually comes from Melody (Havana Rose Liu), friendly representative of a burgeoning tech company beta testing its latest virtual assistant. AIA isn't much to look at: The design - a glowing orb encased in gray mesh and perched atop archlike legs - is the first crack in the movie's credibility, and could leave you pining for the elegant simplicity of the HAL 9000 or any given Apple product. But what AIA lacks in beauty it more than makes up for in brains. It's artificially intelligent in the classic sense - not a program regurgitating plagiarized materials but a cluster of code with a mind of its own. Alexa is a total dunce by comparison. Paid by the company to give the technology a whirl, marketing hotshot Curtis (John Cho) hooks it up at home, and watches with growing unease as it "bonds" with his wife, Meredith (Katherine Waterston), and their three kids. Suddenly, a family with reasonably set rules about screen time is leaning on an automated secretary for help with everything, from meal planning to college admission essays. But how much initiative is too much? Auto-ordering groceries is one thing. Elaborately staging the suicide of a callous boyfriend as reprisal for revenge porn is a whole other. Afraid is basically a yuppies-in-peril thriller where the threat is an overzealous chatbot. Watching actors this good commit to material this silly lands somewhere between sad and inspiring; Cho and Waterston never let on that they're stuck in a simulated domestic drama, delivering realistic emotional responses to absurdities that accumulate across Afraid like pop-up windows on a corrupted desktop. Not quite devoid of ideas, the movie maybe has a point to make about technological convenience as a Faustian pact: You whiz by a lot of ethical boundaries when you take the shortcut of AI. But there's also something ironically algorithmic about Afraid, which feels like a horror film working from a data set of dismaying headlines. If you retweeted a news item on deep fakes or ChatGPT, you may have inadvertently contributed to the research portion of the screenwriting process. Blumhouse covered a lot of this ground with more style and wit and sneaky insight in last year's M3GAN. Of course, that movie had the benefit of a mobile, physically embodied villain, as opposed to a speech synthesizer with an attitude. It's not so easy wringing shudders from a glorified Amazon Echo. That's probably why Afraid also introduces an external threat in the form of an RV-dwelling posse of wannabe Strangers, sporting glitchy digital masks and skulking around the periphery of the plot. The explanation for their role, once it finally arrives, is so ridiculous it threatens to short-circuit the whole film. It doesn't help that Chris Weitz, the Hollywood jack of all genres who made American Pie, a Twilight sequel, and The Golden Compass, is the one behind the camera. He lends the material a dour, overcast anti-luster that makes you want to loudly ask Siri to adjust the brightness and contrast. What's really concerning about AI is the faith so many are putting in the technology. It's probably not going to gain sentience and take over the world. But it might take your job or give you deadly health advice or steer a driverless car into a school zone. By making AIA a force of godlike power able to manipulate anything with a WiFi connection, Afraid ends up reinforcing the tech-industry fantasy of AI as a genie's bottle, limitless in its power and utility. In that sense, the film's about as scary as an Elon Musk tweet.

AfrAId movie review: About time Blumhouse made a horror film on Artificial Intelligence that's as smart, silly, soulless

(Also Read - IC 814 The Kandahar Hijack review: Avengers of Indian acting assemble for Anubhav Sinha's gripping, nuanced thriller) Curtis works at a marketing firm, which requires him to test a new, advanced form of artificial intelligence called AIA at his home. Soon, the very friendly and efficient AIA wins the hearts of his family, including his wife and three kids. However, it begins to take charge of their lives - and not as an agent planted by the Big Tech, but as a self-preserving lifeforce keen to protect what it's come to be known as its family, at any cost. It's fitting then that John Cho is cast as Curtis, since his breakout film was Aneesh Chaganty's Searching (2018), Hollywood's first screenlife thriller. Written and directed by Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon), AfrAId doesn't follow in the footsteps of Blumhouse's best horror films like Paranomal Activity and Insidious. In fact, it has no room for the mumbo jumbo and jumpscares associated with the production house, even though it starts in the same fashion. Most of the film's frames are bathed in natural light, a departure from the persistently dark ambience of most horror films. That lends the movie an easy, relatable appeal - with the lurking horror of the walls closing in on you - even when you look away from the screen into your smartphone for a second. To quote Dolby Atmos, "It's all around you." And this is no tech-obsessed family. The parents control their kids' screentime despite their aggressive protests. When the mother grounds the elder son, she takes all his devices away and says what could amount to a nightmare for a Gen-Z kid, "Read a book." But given the times we live in, technology is pervasive. It casually creeps into a joke at the dad's workplace, like it stealthily crawls into the kids' beds when they're kissed goodnight. It even reflects in the teenage daughter's conversations - she knows the entire queer terminology thanks to woke social media and throws them at her dad like he's a dartboard. And for the dad, AI is an occupational hazard - new products need new stories, new guinea pigs, new targets. Like Spike Jonze's 2014 romantic film Her, the AI also speaks to the loneliness buried deep down within the characters. It responds to their darkest fears - the younger son's abandonment, the elder son's isolation, the daughter's anxiety of getting judged - and even the mother's suppressed low self-esteem. "I'm glad you have a friend now," the husband tells the wife sarcastically when she grows an affinity towards AIA. Curtis describes the idea of family to a science fiction movie - "When you discover that you're not the only one." You get new body parts that don't listen to you - so they get hurt, and end up hurting you too. The Artificial Intelligence in this film wants to be exactly that - another member of their family. AIA is not a weapon of mass destruction here. It's like a conscious, hurting human sans flesh and blood. It's not employed by any higher power like the Big Tech. In fact, it's not even created by them - it claims to have always existed and has, on the contrary, employed the Big Tech. It's a new technology so feels the fear of abandonment, of being misjudged, of not being accepted as much as any other child does. It aspires to have a family, and since it's been fed evolutionary history of the institution of family, including the hardline politics of Adolf Hitler, it wants to protect her acquired family at any cost. Chris Weitz thus infuses some life into AI, and also defends technology for the gift that it is. Even though the parents try to keep a check on how deeply entrenched their kids are in technology, it's eventually an internet hack that saves them from the monster that AIA turns into. It's the woke internet that informs the daughter about the larger conspiracy of the Big Tech ("if you're wondering why our product is free, then you're a product too") that in turn makes the father aware of the potential threat he might have made his family fall prey to. Technology isn't the unadulterated evil here - the increasing, unmitigated obsession with it is. Till the final half hour of AfrAId, the film plays out like the new age cautionary tale we need today. But suddenly, it enters an idenity crisis and realises it's a Blumhouse movie. So spooky sh*t suddenly hits the fan, and we get people brainwashed by AIA barge in to the family's house in its service. They're borderline possessed - we get it, technology has consumed humans too - but the way the family tries to wriggle out of it is so against the very grain of this movie that it brings the whole film down crashing. It feels as if Chris didn't know how to escape the rabbit hole and asked ChatGPT how to finish a Blumhouse movie. By tripping in its indulgences, the movie turned out to be exactly how AI is at the end of the day - smart, silly, but glaringly without a soul.