Afraid is a 2024 thriller that follows a family trying to battle an AI that is becoming engrained in their lives. Brought to us that is the movie-making machine Blumhouse, Afraid falls in line with a lot of recent movies where there are the makings of an interesting movie with its cast and its subject AI, but misses its mark with poor writing, poor story structure, and bland horror elements. With John Cho, Katherine Waterston, and Havana Rose Liu, Afraid was a disappointing watch that had me wanting so much more by the end.
I feel like a broken record every time I review a Blumhouse movie. They have a cool concept for a movie and empower their creatives to make the movie they want as long as they can stick to their budget. They all feel extremely formulaic in that you can play movie mad-libs with them. With Afraid, the structure is a little different, there’s more development of the family and how they’ve bonded with the AI, called AIA.
It felt like they saw how popular M3GAN was and thought, “Hey why don’t we try that again? What’s trendy nowadays? Oh yeah AI?” Yeah, AI is the hot topic now with it being integrated into everything, from phones to every business model possible, so with it comes natural fear. Yet I didn’t think AfrAId did a good job of capitalizing on the fear of AI in a believable way. They treated it as this all-powerful being (literally calling it God at a point) that can just blackmail people into doing its bidding.
The problem is that there is almost no build-up to the conflict at all. Cho and Waterston start to get iffy vibes with AIA and they immediately decide they need not just to get AIA away from their family, but destroy it as well. It ends up being pointless because AIA is of course not tethered to any physical being and can just exist on the internet freely. I feel like the movie also failed to make AIA an actual threat. There is a scene of her from the trailer taking care of an issue with the daughter’s boyfriend but aside from that, the threat to the family comes from other people who also have AIA influencing them. It could’ve worked, but not well in a movie being marketed as an evil AI targeting a family.
A problem I had with this was that there was no resolution that would feel right for a story like this. Even a darker ending still feels like it leaves a lot of meat on the bones. I came out of this feeling like I had just watched an episode of Black Mirror. There were practically no horror elements to this movie either. No scares, no tension, nothing.
It is hard to get around how bad this movie sounds. The writing of this movie is atrocious. Not a single line of dialogue feels human, and as best they try, no one can deliver them well. If there’s anything that can suck you out of the experience immediately, it’s writing that tries to be tech-forward and youthful, but makes the cardinal sin of sounding like it’s written by people who have no idea what they’re talking about.
FINAL THOUGHTS
AfrAId isn’t a movie I recommend watching. I was not the biggest fan of the writing and even with a talented cast, the movie felt so lifeless to get through. The story felt like it lacked any urgency and it lacked any real horror. Again, the cast tried their best, but I walked away feeling disappointed with AfrAId.
