Afraid Movie Review: Last year, Christopher McQuarrie’s spy thriller Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1 introduced a faceless, nameless antagonist in the form of artificial intelligence as the antagonist. So it was only a matter of time that Blumhouse Productions picked up AI and turned it into a ghost in a new horror film. Fortunately, this film plays out more like a relatable, everyday horror movie than Blumhouse’s creepy CGI jumpscare template – until it doesn’t.
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Everyday horrors
Curtis works at a marketing firm that requires him to test a new, advanced form of artificial intelligence called AIA at his home. Soon, the very friendly and efficient AIA wins the hearts of his family, which includes his wife and three children. However, it begins to take responsibility for their lives – and not as an agent planted by Big Tech, but as a self-preserving life force eager to protect the people known as his family at any cost. It is fitting that John Cho is cast as Curtis, as his breakout film was Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching (2018), the first Hollywood screen life thriller.
Written and directed by Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon), Afraid doesn’t follow in the footsteps of Blumhouse’s excellent horror films like Paranomal Activity and Insidious. In fact, it has no room for the nonsense and scaremongering associated with the production house, even though it starts out that way. Most of the film’s frames are bathed in natural light, which is a departure from the relentlessly dark atmosphere of most horror films. This gives the film an effortless, relatable appeal – with the horror lurking off the walls – even when you look away from the screen at your smartphone for a second. Quoting Dolby Atmos, “It’s all around you.”
And this is no tech-savvy family. The parents control their kids’ screentime, despite their aggressive protests. When the mother kicks the older son out of the house, she takes away all his devices and says the equivalent of a nightmare for a Gen-Z kid, “Go read a book.” But given the times we live in, technology is omnipresent. It comes across as a running joke at the father’s workplace, as it sneaks into the kids’ beds when they’re being kissed goodnight. It also shows up in the teenage daughter’s conversations – she knows the entire gay vocabulary thanks to aware social media and hurls it at her father like he’s a dartboard. And for the father, AI is an occupational hazard – new products require new stories, new guinea pigs, new targets.
AI: Deviance or Evil?
As in Spike Jonze’s 2014 romantic film Her, the AI ​​speaks to the loneliness buried deep within the characters. It answers their deepest fears – the abandonment of the younger son, the loneliness of the older son, the anxiety of the daughter’s criticism – and even the mother’s bruised self-esteem. “I’m glad you have a friend now,” the husband sarcastically tells the wife when she grows fond of the AIA. Curtis describes the idea of ​​family as something out of a science fiction film – “when you realize you’re not alone.” You get new body parts that don’t listen to you – so they get hurt, and eventually hurt you too. The artificial intelligence in this film wants to be exactly that – another member of their family.
AIA is not a weapon of mass destruction here. It is more like a conscious, wounded human being, without flesh and blood. It has not been used by some higher power like Big Tech. In fact, it has not even been created by them – it claims to have always existed and, to the contrary, it has taken Big Tech to task. It is a new technology, so it fears being abandoned, misunderstood, not accepted as much as any other child. It desires to have a family, and since it has been indoctrinated with the evolutionary history of the institution of the family, including the fanatical politics of Adolf Hitler, it wants to protect its acquired family at any cost.
Thus Chris Weitz breathes some life into AI, and even defends it as a gift of technology. Even though the parents try to keep an eye on how deeply their children are getting entangled in technology, it is ultimately an internet hack that saves them from the monster that AIA becomes. It is the vigilant internet that informs the daughter about the larger conspiracy of Big Tech (“If you’re wondering why our product is free, you’re a product too”) which in turn makes the father aware of the potential danger he could be exposing his family to. Here technology is not pure evil – but rather the growing, unbridled obsession with it.
Will ChatGPT take over?
Until the last half hour of Afraid, the film plays like a new-age cautionary tale suited to the needs of today. But suddenly, it goes into an identity crisis and realizes that it’s a Blumhouse movie. So suddenly the horror comes to the fore, and we find people brainwashed by AIA infiltrating the family’s home in its service.
They’re borderline possessed – we get it, technology has consumed humans too – but the way the family tries to get out of it is so unlike the original that the whole movie falls apart. It’s as if Chris didn’t know how to get out of the rabbit hole and asked ChatGPT how to end Blumhouse’s film. Stuck in its addiction, the film becomes exactly what AI is at the end of the day – smart, stupid, but clearly without a soul.
