‘AfrAId’ movie review: John Cho fails to enliven this outdated evil-AI story from Blumhouse

A still from ‘AfrAId’
| Photo Credit: Blumhouse Productions

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.

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.

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.

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