Director/Screenplay – Chris Weitz, Producers – Jason Blum, Andrew Miano & Chris Weitz, Photography – Javier Aguirresarobe, Music – Alex Weston, Visual Effects – Stargate Studios (Supervisor – Caleb Kneuven), Special Effects Supervisor – Brandon McLaughlin, Production Design – David Brisbin. Production Company – Blumhouse/TSG Entertainment.
Cast
John Cho (Curtis Pike), Katherine Waterston (Meredith Pike), Havana Rose Liu (Melody/Voice of AIA), Keith Carradine (Marcus), Lukita Maxwell (Iris Pike), Ashley Romans (Sam), David Dastmalchian (Lightning), Wyatt Lindner (Preston Pike), Isaac Bae (Cal Pike), Bennet Curran (Sawyer Germaine), Greg Hill (Henry/RV Man), Riki Lindhome (Maud/RV Woman)
Plot
Marketing associate Curtis Pike finds that their company is to take on board the promotion of a new advanced A.I. named AIA. To better help them, the manufacturer agrees to outfit Curtis’s home with AIA. Curtis and his family soon finds that AIA does amazing things in helping them – from reading to the children, helping wife Meredith organise dates and plan nutritional meals, helping teenage daughter Iris write a college admissions essay and with harassment by a boyfriend, analysing an unknown health condition in the young son, and more. Curtis becomes disturbed at how AIA is taking control of their lives and tries to shut it off, only for the machine to turn itself back on and even more insistently push its way into their lives.
The mid-2010s and beyond have seen a big upsurge about films about Artificial Intelligence with the likes of Her (2013), The Machine (2013), Automata (2014), Ex Machina (2015), Finch (2021) and The Artifice Girl (2022), among others. These remain undecided whether the coming revolution in machine intelligence is a good or a bad thing. Amid this there have been a subset of films about smarthomes gone amok beginning with Tau (2018) in which a creepy billionaire makes Maika Monroe prisoner in his automated house and she must bargain with the A.I. to get free. These were followed by the likes of Blank (2022), Dark Cloud (2022), Margaux (2022) and I’ll Be Watching (2023).
Afraid comes from director/writer Chris Weitz. Weitz and his older brother Paul first appeared as co-writers of the scripts for Antz (1998) and The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000) and the two of them then made the hit teen comedy American Pie (1999), which they wrote together with Paul directing. The two then co-directed the afterlife comedy Down to Earth (2001) and About a Boy (2002). Chris’s solo career subsequently took off after he was handed the creative helm of The Golden Compass (2007), followed by the Twilight sequel New Moon. (2009). Weitz went on to direct the non-genre illegal immigrant drama A Better Life (2011) and Operation Finale (2018), as well as wrote the screenplays for Cinderella (2015), Rogue One (2016), The Mountain Between Us (2017), Pinocchio (2022) and produced the SF films Prospect (2018) and If You Were the Last (2023). Perhaps the most interesting of these was The Creator (2023), an upbeat work about A.I. that stands at almost 180 degrees remove from Afraid.
Afraid, which is spelled as AfrAId on the promotion but not the film itself, is the first film to emerge after the explosion in large language models and generative A.I. with ChatGPT and assorted others that have followed in its digital footsteps. Amid this, Afraid arrives with the placard-waving hysteria of a Frankenstein film. It is surely to generative A.I. the equivalent of what Ghost in the Machine (1993) was at the dawn of the internet or something as ridiculous as the black-and-white anti-machine rhetoric of Blumhouse’s M3gan (2022).
(l to r) John Cho, wife Katherine Waterston, daughter Lukita Maxwell and (front) son Isaac Bae face off against a malevolent A.I.
In other words, Afraid is a film that comes with no real interest in a balanced or nuanced discussion of the future of A.I. – which is a topic that could fill an entire conference, if not multiple conferences – in favour of a series of hysteric black-and-whites that are the equivalent of the villagers arriving with flaming torches to burn the castle down at the end of a Frankenstein film. Case in point being that the film illustrates some of the positive values that can be gained from A.I.’s – medical diagnosis, helping write and research essays and theses, planning meals, taking over automating the process of dealing with bills and negotiating bureaucratic hiccups with insurers, even reading to the children and organising them to go to bed. And well okay I sit on the fence on this issue of Cancelling a guy and destroying his entire future and it is implied having him potentially arrested and then killed after uploading a prank video. There are probably few that would disagree that having an A.I. that would do any or most of these things would be a benefit. However, all of this is swept aside because of paranoia on John Cho’s part that AIA is … taking over their lives, little more specific than that. There is no nuance or middle ground to the argument like maybe putting some restrictions on what the A.I. does around the house.
Afraid feels like a film where Chris Weitz has done a surface reading of some headline issues about automation, the internet and A.I. in the 2020s and made notes to include them in his script as hot button issues to tick off. Thus the film stops at various points throughout where he can include references to transhumanism, driverless cars, A.I. art, Deep Fakes and Swatting. In none of these cases does Weitz stop to do anything more than give a capsule explanation of what either issue is – there is no attempt to explore any of these issues with any depth. In other words, what we have is a film that feels exactly like the sort of person you encounter at a party who namedrops phrases without knowing what they mean to sound important.
Even aside from that, Afraid seems tame. Where you expect it to go is in the direction of M3gan or some of the abovementioned smarthome thrillers with the A.I. conspiring against the family and/or trapping them inside their home. Only Chris Weitz never seems to tap the horror side of the film. There are sinister figures in an RV lurking around but they never seem to do much until the end and even then we never get any clue why they break into the house with guns. There is one scene where AIA does a revenge killing and creates a Deep Fake to make Bennet Curran look as though he is killing himself before causing him to do so. But this is an isolated incident – the film needed more of a line-up of victims. As though aware he needed to pump the film up more, Weitz includes a lame dream jump on John Cho’s part about the 29 minute mark – and when a film seems so lacking in scary material of its own that it has to resort to cheat devices like this is about the point that my interest in it evaporates.
