Afraid (2024)
Directed by: Chris Weitz
Premise: An advertising executive (John Cho) and his family are selected to beta test an artificially intelligent home device that manages the household. The AI proves more powerful and influential than anyone expected.
What Works: Afraid has an interesting and relevant premise. With the ubiquity of devices like Amazon’s Alexa and programs such as Apple’s Siri and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the premise of Afraid is not far off from our present reality. The movie’s best moments dramatize the encroachment of these smart devices into our lives and the way they become normalized and inextricable from our homes. The relationship between the parents (John Cho and Katherine Waterston) is especially well rendered. The wife and mother works on her doctoral thesis from home but is bogged down with domestic chores until the AI alleviates her work load; the tension between husband and wife has some credibility and the AI comes between them. The film also addresses the way our sense of reality is shaped by technology including our beliefs about danger and what is real.
What Doesn’t: These are all interesting ideas and it’s a shame that the filmmakers of Afraid foul up nearly every one of them. Each member of the family has a unique subplot built around their relationship to the AI but none of the subplots are done well. There’s little build up. The family’s interactions with the AI start innocent enough but quickly go off the rails with the AI engaging in psychotic behavior. Unlike the underrated Child’s Play remake from 2019, the AI of Afraid does not have a personality of its own nor is there any logic to its choices. As close to reality as the premise may be, a lot of Afraid doesn’t make sense. The AI knows things that it could not have access to and operates without power. The filmmakers come across at a loss for what to do with this idea beyond the obvious and they ultimately abandon their central idea. The slow-moving invasion of the home by AI is sidelined for a bizarre cult story in which people follow the directives of the artificial intelligence. It’s obvious what the filmmakers are trying to do—presenting the AI as a sort of Frankenstein’s monster and reversing the power relationship between technology and people—but it’s not done with any competence. The film also fails on the basis of entertainment. Afraid is a twenty-first century permutation of 1990s thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Single White Female but Afraid is never scary or exciting.
Bottom Line: Afraid squanders an interesting idea. The filmmakers don’t know what to do with the concept, riffing on tech headlines but adding no depth, and Afraid is scattershot and not very entertaining.
Episode: #1012 (September 8, 2024)