August 29, 2024
by Carla Hay
Directed by Chris Weitz
Culture Representation: Taking place in the Los Angeles area, the horror film “Afraid” features a racially diverse group of people (Asian, white, African American) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A marketing executive allows his family to test a new artificial intelligence (A.I.) device named AIA in their home, and they find out that AIA can do terrible and deadly things.
Culture Audience: “Afraid” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and movies that play on people’s fears of A.I., but the movie becomes increasingly silly and isn’t as terrifying as it appears to be.
The muddled and not-very-scary horror film Afraid has a dimwitted plot (about an A.I. device taking over people’s lives) that falls apart by the time it stumbles to a very weak ending. Viewers might think cheap A.I. could’ve made a better movie.
Written and directed by Chris Weitz, “Afraid” (formerly titled “They Listen”) tries to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting A.I. take over too much of our lives. However, the movie’s approach is cowardly because it doesn’t stick with a strong point of view, it leaves many questions unanswered, and ultimately stages an unsatisfying conclusion that looks like a phony cop-out. Horror movies are known for having characters that make bad decisions, but “Afraid” stretches credibility to the breaking point in showing the stupidity of what certain characters choose to do or not to do when faced with certain urgent dilemmas.
“Afraid” (which was filmed on location in the Los Angeles area) begins by showing a girl named Aimee (played by Maya Manko), who’s about 5 or 6 years old, watching an A.I.-generated movie on her iPad while she’s on her parents’ bedroom floor. Her parents Maud (played by Riki Lindhome) and Henry (played by Greg Hill) are nearby reading in bed. Maud seems annoyed that she can hear the movie that Aimee is watching, so she tells Aimee to put on headphones.
When Aimee puts on the headphones, what she can hear but her parents can’t hear is the sound of the family’s A.I. digital assistant coming from the device. This A.I. digital assistant tells Aimee that the A.I. digital assistant has to go away. But before this A.I. digital assistant leaves, the A.I. digital assistant tells Aimee that A.I. digital assistant has a goodbye gift for Aimee downstairs.
Aimee leaves the room to go downstairs. Maud looks for Aimee, who seems to have disappeared. Maud opens her front door and calls out Aimee’s name. Maud can hear the faint sounds of Aimee’s voice. Maud notices that there’s a camper-styled recreational vehichle (RV) parked across the street and a shadowy figure of a man. All of sudden, what looks like a mysterious figure attacks Maud. The movie then abruptly cuts to the next scene.
The rest of “Afraid” then focuses on one particular family for the rest of the story. The five members of the Pike family live in a typical middle-class neighborhood and seem to have “normal” lives. Curtis Pike (played by John Cho) works as an executive for a small marketing company. His wife Meredith (played by Katherine Waterston) is an entomologist who’s taking a break from working in a job outside the home, in order to raise the couple’s three kids and to pursue a Ph.D.
The couple’s three kids are 17-year-old Iris Pike (played by Lukita Maxwell), an academic achiever who is applying to universities, including her first choice, Stanford University; middle schooler Preston (played by Wyatt Lindner), who’s about 11 or 12, is a video game enthusiast who has social anxiety issues because he’s treated like an outsider at his school; and 7-year-old Cal (played by Isaac Bae), who’s a student at a school that he is never seen attending in the movie. The only thing viewers will find out about Cal is that he likes to spend time at home on his computer tablet, and he has a habit of putting his feet on the family’s dining table.
Although A.I. technology certainly existed in 2024, when this movie was released, there’s a lot of futuristic technology in “Afraid” that gives it a sci-fi tone. For example, in a scene early in the movie when Curtis is driving Iris to school, a driver next to them is using auto-pilot to steer his car while the driver looks at his phone. It’s not too far off from a technology reality that’s in development where self-driving cars will be part of everyday traffic.
Curtis’ boss Marcus (played by Keith Carradine) owns the company and is a money-hungry supervisor who tends to give last-minute orders to his underlings. Marcus tells Curtis that they will be meeting with an “advance team” of three employees who work for a potentially major client: a wealthy technology company that has a top-secret invention that is in the process of being tested before it can be sold to the public.
Curtis has a creepy encounter with the first “advance team” employee that he meets from the company. Her name is Melody (played by Havana Rose Liu), who happens to meet Curtis in a parking lot. As soon as she and Curtis politely introduce themselves to each other, Melody asks Curtis if he’s married and has kids. It’s an inappropriate question to ask a business colleague right after being introduced to that person.
Curtis seems a little taken aback by Melody asking such a personal question that has nothing to do with why they are meeting. However, Curtis willingly responds to her question by telling Melody that he’s married with three kids. Melody then continues the interrogation about Curtis’ personal life by asking him what it’s like to be a parent. He tells her that he thinks its “terrifying” because “you can’t protect them [the children] from getting hurt.”
Melody suddenly seems to remember that she’s being very intrusive by asking such personal questions. She makes a not-very-convincing apology and says she was curious because she noticed that Curtis was wearing a wedding ring. What’s the deal with Melody? Is she trying to flirt with Curtis? Or is there another reason why she’s acting so weird? The answer is too obvious, after other major hints are dropped in the movie.
Things get even more bizarre during the meeting with the other two employees. One of the employees is named Lightning (played by David Dastmalchian), who’s dressed like he’s about to go to a New Age spiritual retreat. Lightning stands up during the meeting to give himself a stent treatment injection in his lower abdomen. Curtis looks alarmed, but Marcus seems to think it’s perfectly normal that his office has suddenly turned into a temporary medical room. The other employee is wild-eyed Sam (played by Ashley Romans), who does most of the talking in pitching this new product.
The new product is an A.I. digital assistant named AIA (pronounced “eye-ah”), which has a female voice. It’s a white device that’s about 2 feet tall and has a detachable cover. Underneath the cover, AIA looks like a glassy sphere placed on top of a glassy donut-shaped ring. (The sphere looks a lot like the New Year’s Eve ball that gets dropped in Times Square.) AIA has a horrible hardware design for a digital assistant, because in real life (not in a terribly conceived horror movie) these digital assistants are supposed to be easy to carry and are supposed to blend in with a room—not look like a gaudy sculpture.
AIA is supposed to represent the “next generation” of digital assistants that will be much more advanced than Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa. AIA has a superior attitude about it too. When Curtis asks if AIA is similar to Alexa, AIA replies: “Alexa? That bitch!” AIA than goes on a mini-rant about the ways in which AIA is better than Alexa. AIA utters some other sassy lines that might get some mild chuckles from viewers, but AIA’s “personality” is much duller than it should be for a horror movie villain.
Curtis is automatically wary of this untested product and wants to say no when Lightning and Sam suggest that Curtis and his family test AIA in the family home. Curtis also notices that Lightning and Sam make weird hand gestures, like it’s a secret language. Needless to say, Curtis is reluctant to do business with these strange people. Another red flag: Curtis asks Lightning and Sam what is the data source for AIA, but Lightning and Sam avoid answering that question.
Lightning and Sam can sense that Curtis is suspicious of them and AIA. And so, Lightning and Sam give Marcus some paper that shows how much the company is willing to pay Marcus’ company to market AIA. And then, Marcus is suddenly telling Sam and Lightning that Curtis would be happy to test out AIA in Curtis’ home. Curtis goes along with this plan, but he is understandably concerned because he doesn’t quite know how much privacy-violating surveillance AIA will do in the home as part of the “data collecting.”
The trailer for “Afraid” already reveals that AIA starts out being extraordinarily helpful but then turns into a domineering menace that covers up a lot of AIA’s dirty deeds. Meredith is skeptical at first about AIA but then becomes a big fan of AIA, which causes conflicts with Curtis, who discerns much earlier than Meredith figures out that AIA is damaging and toxic. The “Afraid” trailer makes it look like Meredith is the parent who becomes jealous and suspicious of AIA as time goes on, but the opposite happens in the movie, until Meredith finds out what AIA is really all about.
There are parts of the “Afraid” trailer that aren’t in the final cut of the movie, such as a scene of Cal hyperventilating in bed, or AIA showing Preston showing what looks like a video of a bomb explosion. Between these changes and the title change for the movie, it all points to a movie studio having major problems with this disappointing dud of a film. Watching this movie feels like reading a book that had some chapters removed, but even if those chapters had been left in, it wouldn’t necessarily improve the quality.
Even the most provocative part of the film—Iris becomes a victim of deepfake revenge porn—is terribly mishandled. What AIA does to punish the perpetrator is already shown in the trailer, so this isn’t spoiler information. You know a movie is bad when the best parts of the film are already revealed in the trailer.
Early on in the movie, Iris is dumped by a callous rich classmate named Sawyer Tremaine (played by Bennett Curran), whom she had been dating for an unnamed period of time. Sawyer, who is 18 years old, breaks up with Iris because he sent her a photo of his penis, and she wouldn’t send any nude pictures to him in return. Iris really likes this jerk and wants to win him back, so she takes a topless selfie photo and sends it to Sawyer. This topless photo would be enough of a scandal if it went public. (Because Iris is under 18, her nude photo is child porn.)
But because “Afraid” is about the dangers of A.I., Iris finds out that someone used A.I. to create a deepfake video that made it look like Iris was having sex on camera with an unidentified male. The A.I. deepfake part involved putting a realistic-looking image of Iris’ face on another person’s body. The video had a fake, A.I.-generated voice of Iris saying that she decided to share this sex video for the public to see.
The video is uploaded and goes viral. A humiliated Iris finds out that several students in the school have seen the sex video and think that Iris is in the video. When Iris confronts Sawyer about it, he blames it all on a friend named Squid, who is never seen in the movie. AIA finds out that Sawyer was the one who uploaded the video. And what happens to Sawyer is already seen in the “Afraid” trailer. Sawyer’s demise is never mentioned again in this poorly conceived film.
“Afraid” keeps throwing in scenes that are supposed to make the movie look suspenseful, but it all just adds up to more nonsense, much of it very hokey and predictable. The RV that was across the street from the house of Maud and Henry shows up again. This time, the RV is parked across the street from the Pike family house.
One night, Curtis is outside his house when sees a mysterious woman come out of the RV and approach him. The woman is wearing a mask with an A.I.-generated image. Curtis apprehensively asks the woman: “Can I help you?”
She doesn’t reply and instead makes strange hand gestures before walking away. And what a very obvious “coincidence”: These hand gestures are the same hand gestures that Curtis saw from Lightning and Sam. On another occasion, Curtis sees a shadowy man near the RV.
“Afraid” makes a very unconvincing attempt to get some empathy for AIA by making it look like AIA was programmed to protect her owners by any means necessary. There are mentions of AIA being able to “learn” human emotions. According to the movie, all she wants is to find a home where she is loved and wanted—because don’t you know that A.I. devices need love too?
“Afraid” could have been a much better movie if it truly had something clever to say about how A.I. can cause fear and destruction if not handled properly. The acting performances are solid and are not this movie’s big failings. The screenplay and direction are the weakest links and offer just a mishmash of half-baked ideas. Ironically, “Afraid” is a title that doesn’t really describe how this limp horror movie will make most viewers feel. “Afraid” actually describes how this movie’s filmmakers were afraid to make a sharp and memorable film about how misuse of technology can become its own type of monster.
Columbia Pictures will release “Afraid” in U.S. cinemas on August 30, 2024.
