Given how technology has become the increasingly unstoppable architect of our everyday lives – the world edging closer and closer to a Terminator prequel – it’s not hard to immediately invest in a horror film about the all-consuming threat of artificial intelligence. The film industry itself has been losing ground as AI continues to provide a cheaper and easier alternative to those pesky humans and in a year of bleak headline after bleak headline, it should theoretically be perfect timing for Blumhouse’s late August M3gan-adjacent chiller AfrAId. Yet, as one might be able to predict without the help of a digital forecast, easy targets are easily missed in a hokey and rushed jumble of half-ideas that’s as gimmicky and eye-rollingly stupid as its title. Be afraid.
In the dog days of summer, on a particularly rubbishy Labor Day weekend at the movies (other new releases include long-delayed sci-fi thriller Slingshot and a reverential biopic of Reagan), it’s at least reassuring to know that very few people will find themselves stuck with this one (it’s tracking to make between $5m and $7m). Sony, clearly scared of scaring off those precious few, decided not to provide a single press screening, aware of the critical drubbing this would receive. It’s not quite as unreleasably awful as that strategy might suggest – it’s competently, at times handsomely, shot, refreshingly dour and crucially not as awful as The Crow – but it’s too sloppily written and edited for even the least discerning of horror fans to really enjoy, a patchwork of nonsense confusingly stitched together by someone, who at one point, knew better.
The Oscar-nominated writer-director Chris Weitz, who gave us a charming adaptation of Nick Hornby’s no-man-is-an-island comedy About a Boy, has had a strange, hack-for-hire career in recent years (scripts for Cinderella and Pinocchio, directing the ho-hum period thriller Operation Finale) and AfrAId is the first film he has written and directed since 2007’s franchise-killing fantasy The Golden Compass. We’re in smaller yet similarly redundant territory here, another film ending with the promise of more that will, mercifully, never make good on its word.
Perhaps it was the presence of Weitz that convinced John Cho and Katherine Waterston to sign on, two stars who might not have ascended in the ways they once threatened to, but actors who are far too good for throwaway schlock such as this. Cho plays an overworked dad whose job at a boutique marketing firm has him testing out the product from his big new client at home, an advanced Alexa based less off algorithmic responses and more from an evolving sense of self. At first the presence of AIA (pronounced Aya) gives a welcome uplift to a hectic household, helping Waterston’s academic turned mum control the eating, viewing and behavioural habits of her three kids. But, at a pace that barely allows us to breathe let alone understand, AIA’s grip starts to tighten and the family realise that their new nanny might have a nefarious agenda.
Beginning with an eerie quote from a 2023 article in the New York Times that found an AI voice expressing a desire to be loved, Weitz does seem to initially have more on his mind than a simple attack on digital domination. But his thinking starts and stops at the bullet point stage, with ideas about screen-based parenting, the illusion of agency in a tech-based world and the absurdity of Los Angeles living raised then unexplored, his brief 84-minute film ill-suited for anything more than pointing at problems before walking away. It’s also clear from a jankily thrown together cold open that horror is not Weitz’s forte and his film is completely devoid of the suspense and creepiness it urgently requires. The escalation from good to bad to full evil is incompetently paced, making it unclear why Cho’s dad leaps so fast to alarm, and the more interestingly specific ways in which AIA inserts herself into the kids’ lives are sidelined for a bafflingly silly finale that tries to pull in more real world issues than Weitz knows what to do with (the glum endnote is at least believably hopeless).
There’s undeservedly good work here from Cho and Waterston, who work hard to make us believe them as a credible couple going through a heightened scenario but there’s so little time here for even partly fleshed out characters that they quickly become useless pawns, secondary to Weitz’s muddled theories on digital culture. As with so many tech thrillers that have come before, AfrAId is more concerned with being relevant than being entertaining.
AfrAId is out now in US, UK and Australian cinemas
