Afraid (2024)

1 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Artificial Unintelligence

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

AI is a hot topic for horror, and there's a great deal that could be done with it, but Chris Weitz's PG-13-rated Afraid, despite good characters and a promising setup, goes haywire with a silly, one-note third act.

Curtis Pike (John Cho) works for a high-powered advertising firm, and his family is chosen to test a new in-home AI device called "AIA." At first AIA seems like a miracle, ordering healthy lunches for the kids, reading to them, and even diagnosing a dangerous health condition in the youngest son, Cal (Isaac Bae).

It helps Curtis's wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston) resurrect her long-dormant thesis on ants, and it helps teen daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell) out of a potentially destructive social media situation. It's not long, though, before AIA begins taking things into its own hands, with deadly consequences. Curtis urges his family to shut down the device, but no one can possibly know how far AIA's influence stretches.

Writer and director Weitz, whose previous experience with horror extends no further than The Twilight Saga: New Moon, starts Afraid off poorly, with a prologue and a jump-scare, before getting to his strong suit: the characters. The struggles of the Pike family are real, including trying to get the kids off to school, dealing with sick kids, screen time, feet on the table, the works. Meredith is especially relatable, not sure what to make of the descriptor "mom" and wanting to finish her scholarly work on ants. (The parallel between insect eyes and AIA's camera eyes is sadly never explored.)

Indeed, it's hard not to get excited by AIA, and the quick, clever solutions it offers. (The device is voiced by Havana Rose Liu, who also plays Melody, an employee at the company that invented it.) But when AIA begins to turn, it feels too easy, guided more by the irrational fears of humans than by what might actually be scientifically plausible. It's partly as if Weitz suddenly remembered he was making a horror movie, and needed to put some creepy figures and dumb nightmare sequences in there to scare people.

AIA becomes a one-dimensional villain that cackles and discusses its evil plan without any consideration of what made it that way. The movie is cheerfully advertised as "from the producer of M3GAN," which is a similar movie about an artificial intelligence tangling with humans, but with so much more wit and emotional depth. Afraid falls far short of it, as if running out of battery power before it could get anywhere.