Afraid movie review: This film needs an AI check

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Then, one day, Curtis (Cho) lands a new untested AI device, named ‘AIA’ and pronounced as ‘aayah’ – which promises to be friend, helper, problem-solver and organiser, all rolled into one. The company making it has approached his marketing firm to sell it and his own family is seen as the perfect sample to put AI to test – in turn helping him package it for clients better.

Wife Meredith (Waterston) has a little bit of the artist in her – she studies animals, but has put her doctoral thesis on hold to be stay-at-home “mom”, a description she chafes against. Hence, she is initially sceptical about AIA, especially about its “eyes” or cameras which are put around the house by the installation team. But then AIA unveils the taste of all that it can take off the hands of a homemaker, and Meredith changes her mind.

AIA also goes about wooing the children by catering to each specifically: the youngest Cal can now go to sleep to bedtime stories that Mom often can’t find time for, the middle-schooler Preston can bypass screen time and take on schoolmates who have sidelined him, and 17-year-old Iris whose boyfriend has been twisting her hand to share her nude pictures can get back.

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How Iris’s whole life is turned upside down and then put back together again in the form AIA deems fit, in all the time it takes for the teenager to walk down a school corridor, is slickly done. It’s interesting the problems the film puts up before its characters. And anyone with two squabbling kids knows how tempting it is to take any help – even if from a screen.

But then the Blumhouse factory production decides the scares must roll in, and without logic or any alignment with what its characters have been doing, and at senseless speed, Afraid runs with it. Cautionary tales about AI have never had a better moment than now, when even industry leaders have warned of “human extinction”. Surely, handling one family should have been a nanosecond’s work for it.

Afraid movie director: Chris Weitz

Afraid movie cast: John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, Wyatt Lindner, Isaac Bae

Afraid movie rating: 1.5 stars