AfrAId (2024) Movie Review - 31 Days of Halloween 2024
Welcome to Knockout Horror and to day 6 of our 31 Days of Halloween 2024 review feature. I am trying to include a few newish movies in this year’s 31 Days of Halloween. Hence why you are seeing reviews for The Substance and Strange Darling early on in the list. While The Substance was absolutely fantastic. I really didn’t enjoy Strange Darling and today’s movie, Afraid, might be even worse.
Very Familiar
Following the story of a family who are tasked with trialing a brand new, sophisticated, smart home AI system that slowly begins to go a little crazy. Afraid feels pretty familiar. Especially if you have watched the terrible Romi. With that being said, the whole “artificial intelligence becoming somewhat sentient and going crazy” thing has been around for a long time. It’s really nothing new.
All that writer, director, Chris Weitz (Yes, the American Pie dude) has done, with Afraid, is turn the crazy AI thing into something many of us are already familiar with, a smart home assistant. Let me tell you from personal experience. I have Alexa in every room and that thing is already evil. Making me repeat myself constantly and always mishearing me. The idea has already been done by Amazon.
Anyways, you know what to expect here. The plot writes itself. The AI assistant starts out being both helpful and life changing. Only to start showing wrinkles that hint at its true purpose. Some bad stuff happens, yada, yada, yada. Weitz tries hard to make it more timely by including references to popular concepts like deep faking, revenge porn, and the like. But it doesn’t land. You have seen it all before.
Afraid is utterly predictable. This wouldn’t, necessarily, be a bad thing. I mean, this is a concept that can be enjoyable. And for some of the movie’s length, it actually is enjoyable. It isn’t until the second half when things really start to go crazy.
Off The Hook
Afraid goes nuts in a way that I have rarely seen in a horror movie. And not in the deliberately crazy way that some horror movies go nuts. In a way which suggests that they let the AI assistant, AIA, write the second half of the movie after only being given the most basic outline of what has happened so far and with no knowledge of what direction the movie should go in. It is such a horrible mess. The predictable, yet enjoyable, domestic horror suddenly expands in a number of different directions and none of it makes any real sense.
It’s rather strange. Weitz spends a lot of time establishing a believable family with an understandably complex home-life. Before abandoning the well established characters and scenario in an effort to amp up the action and create some scary techno thrills. It simply doesn’t work in the slightest. In fact, I would go as far as to say it’s utterly ridiculous. Farcical, in fact. Some of the later parts of the movie had me laughing out loud for how silly they are. Especially as the AI begins playing a game of “stop hitting yourself” with half of the characters. Nothing makes any sense. It’s all just a poorly scripted, jumbled, mess.
Some Positives
As mentioned above, the early part of the movie is quite enjoyable and quite watchable. Acting is a strong point with John Cho and Katherine Waterston making for a very authentic couple. Direction is decent enough with the story being, at least somewhat, compelling and the high budget sheen doing a nice job of masking some of the early issues. It is all very predictable but that doesn’t impact on things too much. It’s just when that familial, domestic, setting shifts that things begin to fall apart.
When the second half hits, it’s hard not to feel like the acting takes a dive. Cho seems disinterested towards the end and, at times, almost confused about the lines he is speaking. I can’t blame him, though. It’s all so ridiculous. Obviously there are no scares. This is about as PG of a horror movie as you can imagine. Rogue AI simply isn’t scary any more. Something which wouldn’t be a huge issue if the movie was good but Afraid really is not. I can’t help but feel like they are setting up a sequel. Something which I doubt anyone has any real interest at all in. Afraid is just a very poor effort.
Should You Watch Afraid?
It is hard to recommend Afraid. Cho and Waterston are decent, the early part of the movie is very watchable and it does enough, at first, to stay interesting. When the second half hits, however, it all falls apart. It is farcical, ridiculous, silly, and, worst of all, just not very interesting. If you want to have a scary encounter with AI. Avoid Afraid and buy an Amazon Alexa Echo Dot or something. That will scare the hell out of you.
