While the rest of us try to figure out if Artificial Intelligence will ultimately help us do our jobs or put us all out of work, Hollywood is determined to embrace AI. We've already seen movies like The Creator, Atlas and Alien: Romulus act as stealth AI propaganda by equating fear of AI to racism and xenophobia. One corner of Hollywood however seems determined to exploit our fears of AI, and that's the horror studio Blumhouse. The studio scored a hit with their 2022 AI thriller M3GAN, which likened AI to an uncontrollable tearaway child. With AfrAId, AI is posited as something of an irresponsible parent. That the movie attracted actors of the quality of John Cho, Katherine Waterston and Keith Carradine probably reflects the current disdain towards AI in Hollywood's acting stable.
Cho and Waterston play Curtis and Meredith, parents to teen Iris (Lukita Maxwell), tween Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and toddler Cal (Isaac Bae). Curtis is a hotshot marketing exec whose latest client is a creepy tech firm with a new product they want to install in America's homes. AIA (pronounced "aye-a" and voiced by Havana Rose Liu) is a sort of Alexa on steroids, ostensibly capable of looking after all your needs. At his boss's (Carradine) behest, Curtis agrees to allow his family to act as guinea pigs, taking an AIA unit into their home.
Where M3GAN reworked the Bad Seed evil child format, AfrAId is essentially a cross between Donald Cammell's Demon Seed and a Lifetime killer nanny thriller. From the latter it borrows the template of the nanny coming off as benevolent at first, winning over all but one family member, in this case Curtis. AIA makes friends with Meredith by helping organise household bills and chores, and having sisterly conversations that inspire Meredith to resume her studies. It helps Iris get revenge for a deepfake porn video made by her asshole boyfriend. It overwrites the parental-imposed screen time lock of Preston's tablet. It entertains Cal with bedtime stories that are more inventive than those his parents come up with.
While his family fall under AIA's spell, Curtis grows increasingly suspicious. For a start, one of AIA's human reps is played by David Dastmalchian, so that's a big red flag right there. Curtis notices masked strangers hanging around his home (yet bafflingly doesn't alert the cops), which ties into a home invasion prologue. His attempts to remove AIA from his home are increasingly thwarted.
Best known for comedies like American Pie and About a Boy, writer/director Chris Weitz may seem an odd fit for a tech-thriller. But then we remember how he produced his brother Paul's 2004 movie In Good Company, which dealt with the malign influence of tech companies on traditional media. Both movies serve as warnings regarding all we might lose in our quest for convenience, and both arrive at the rather depressing conclusion that there's little we can do to change the future big tech has mapped out for us, but AfrAId lacks the satirical bite of In Good Company.
Weitz is clearly not a fan of AI, opening his movie with a credits sequence that mocks the uncanny valley AI visuals we've all recently been exposed to on social media by tech-bros desperate to convince us this slop can become a substitute for human-made art. There's an anger towards AI that hasn't been present in other thrillers that have broached the subject, and some finger-wagging directed specifically towards parents who would rather hand off child-rearing to a machine than put in the work themselves. It's encouraging to see a filmmaker take such a stand, but Weitz fails to integrate his ideas and concerns into a compelling narrative, and you get the impression he doesn't truly understand what it is he's criticising. He's ill-suited to the horror/thriller genre, proving incapable of creating any suspenseful sequences, and you can't help but wish he had followed the lead of M3GAN and leaned more into comedy (come to think of it, Blumhouse's best movies in recent years - Happy Death Day, M3GAN, Totally Killer - have been comedies rather than straight horrors), something we get a brief hint of here when AIA refers to Alexa as "that bitch."
At 84 minutes with about 10 of those taken up by the end credits, AfrAId plays like it's had some key scenes chopped out. Much of its lore is confusing, especially a subplot regarding the family we see in the prologue. The ending is so abrupt it's as though Weitz heard the ping of his microwave from the kitchen and decided to wrap up the script so he could enjoy his TV dinner while it was still hot.
Regardless of how genuine their concerns may be, movies as bad as AfrAId do a disservice to the very legitimate scepticism surrounding AI. If artists are to present their fears to the tech world they need to do specific research rather than shoehorning AI apprehension into old TV-movie-of-the-week plotlines. There are some interesting ideas and concerns raised in AfrAId, but they're all half-baked, resulting in a movie that ironically resembles a piece of unstable tech rushed out to consumers when it's badly in need of an upgrade.
Directed by: Chris Weitz
Starring: John Cho, Katherine Waterson, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, David Dastmalchian, Keith Carradine
