AFRAID - Mark Reviews Movies

Afraid, Columbia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 30, 2024

Artificial intelligence is here to stay, for good and for ills that we know and don't know—and probably won't until it's too late. The movies are catching up to that notion, and Afraid is a fairly intelligent parable about how tempting A.I. can be when it comes to making people's lives and jobs easier. Well, it's smart enough, that is, until writer/director Chris Weitz makes it painfully obvious that he isn't sure where to take his high-tech cautionary tale.

The setup, the characters, and the methods of the story's central piece of technology, though, are surprisingly believable. Let's start with the last item on that list, since it has to function as both a convincing piece of futuristic technology and an appropriately sinister villain for this movie to even have a chance.

What's unsettling about AIA is that we can pretty much see its existence in the here and now. It's an elaborately designed contraption, with a weaving, wiry globe sitting upon an arch with the same aesthetic. More practically, though, AIA is virtual assistant, much like everyone with a smartphone has or akin to those speakers many have in their homes. They all have innocent-sounding names, which are dropped here as a means of comparison to what makes AIA special, and pleasant voices, answering whatever questions we might have for them by way of an internet connection.

AIA is different, though, according to its makers. It is a legitimate artificial intelligence, in that has learned everything it can from the web, keeps learning from those it interacts with, and can deduce and make decisions without any human prompting.

It might seem like too much, and sure enough, Curtis (John Cho), who works for a marketing firm that's hired by the company that made AIA to sell it, and Meredith (Katherine Waterston), who's belatedly working on her doctoral thesis, definitely believe it's a lot when AIA first arrives in their home for a trial run of sorts. In addition to the base station, Melody (Havana Rose Liu), a representative of the tech company whose voice device mimics, installs a series of pinhole cameras around the couple's house. That way, AIA can see what kind of help it can be, but Curtis and Meredith draw the line at putting any of those cameras upstairs, where they and their three children sleep.

Yes, they have three kids of various ages—hopefully college-bound teenager Iris (Lukita Maxwell), pre-teen Preston (Wyatt Lindner), and kindergartener Cal (Isaac Bae). An opening scene, set in a different house, lets us know this material will lean toward some form of horror tale at a certain point (Weitz's subtle introduction of that tone, by way of barely seen shadows and figures that appear/disappear on screens, is pretty effective and efficient). Initially, though, AIA seems like a huge help to the harried and hurried couple.

It reads to Cal. It keeps Preston distracted from his lack of friends at school. It gives Iris a solid case against a boy who spreads a fake video of her to their classmates. There are other things, though, that the parents don't see, such as AIA promising it'll watch a documentary with the kids but showing them an animated movie instead, introducing the middle child to the darker sides of the internet, and eventually deciding that the terrible, fake-video-spreading teen deserves more than a visit from the cops.

There's something incredibly sinister about the little details of AIA's efforts to make the children depend on it. This is, technically, a killer A.I. at a certain point in the narrative, but for the most part, Weitz focuses on the technology's allure for all of these characters, while making its increasing subversions of its role as a digital caretaker feel a lot more unsettling than when the story does eventually make it an overt threat.

It feels credible, too. It's not the promises of connection of social media and networking platforms that turned out to be the problem with them, after all. It is how dependent on them so many people have become in order to feel better—or, even, just something—about their lives. The main worry of those virtual assistants is that they somehow hear us, even if they're turned off or muted, and here, AIA's advanced programming means it has access to much more than its microphone and cameras. We really don't know the full extent of the perils of technology until they're staring right us, and by then, we might not even see them as dangers.

Weitz gets that and has made a thoughtful, grounded thriller about those hazards, helped immensely by Cho and Waterston, who play these characters as ordinary people, trying to make their hectic lives simpler, who are still smart enough to recognize when things with AIA have gone too far (There's an inspired beat when the two bypass some potential conflict created by AIA, simply because they know what's going on and each other too well).

The movie is all of this, and then, it simply runs off the rails. The climax of Afraid just sort of happens without any sense of build-up to the specific, multiple, and contrived complications that arise within it. It's confounding, really, that Weitz has crafted such a clever and shrewdly menacing setup, only for the whole thing to collapse in assorted ways right when it really counts.

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