Afraid Review: Aimless AI Horror

"Afraid" seems, from the very beginning, like an inevitable movie. Like the meme-worthy "M3GAN" with its tale of a killer robot best friend, and "Host" with its digital seance gone very wrong, it's a movie playing with concepts that are top of mind in American culture right now. And since horror has a long history of taking such concepts and turning them into all-out nightmares, it feels at first blush like one of those movies that fits right in.

The problem starts when the film tries to make its conceptual hook into anything more than a horror sandbox. The story of an evil AI that tries to endear itself to a family by any means necessary is something easily latched onto, but once "Afraid" starts trying to build on that, it crumbles under the weight of too many ideas jockeying for position. Despite a cast of endearing key players, a couple of solid scares, and a story rooted in certain fears a lot of us can easily relate to, it's a film that spreads itself so thin that, by the end, the only thing it can really be is a mess.

Curtis Pike (John Cho) is a marketing executive trying to land a deal with a major tech firm led by a man called Lightning (David Dastmalchian), who claims to have the most advanced artificial intelligence on the market. Dubbed "AIA" (it rhymes with Maya), the company's tech is friendly, observant, quick to respond, and even apparently a pretty good babysitter. Curtis is invited to take it home and test-drive it with his own family to get a feel for just how good AIA is, and just how marketable it will be.

At first, his wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston) and teenage daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell) are skeptical about AIA, believing it to be at best a distraction and at worst a surveillance system that will make them all very uncomfortable with its numerous "eyes" placed around the house. The more AIA (voiced by Havana Rose Liu, who also plays one of the tech company's employees) sticks around, though, the more she's able to make herself invaluable to the family and is welcomed fully into their home, even if strange dreams and stranger blips in the AI's interface have Curtis increasingly convinced that something is very wrong.

Of course, we as an audience already know that something is very wrong. Writer/director Chris Weitz, in his first all-out horror effort after making films like "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" and "The Golden Compass" (a box office bomb that really hurt its studio), lays out some of the film's creepy framework with a genuinely chilling opening sequence involving a different family mixed up with AI. There are creepy images flashing across screens, faces morphed by AI generation, and mysterious masked figures who may or may not be part of some grander conspiracy. There are also, when the film has the patience to let them play out, some decent jump scares here. As a horror film, things start out promising, even if the script sometimes feels a bit stilted. There's something there, but the more the film tries to uncover it, the worse things get.

The good news, arguably the best news when it comes to the whole film, is that the cast is made up of actors we as an audience generally like watching. We believe John Cho as the devoted dad who's suspicious of his new clients; we believe Katherine Waterston as the loving mother who wants a little more for herself; and Lukita Maxwell is convincing as the teenage girl caught in a high school mess. Even the youngest Pike children, Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and Cal (Isaac Bae), have something relatable and emotionally honest in their eyes. It all adds to the sense of potential lurking in the film's setup, which makes it all the more frustrating when things fall apart.

So, what exactly goes wrong? The issue is twofold, and it starts with the film's pacing. "Afraid" runs a brisk 84 minutes, which in horror usually feels like a good thing, but so much of the film is built on conversations about what's scary instead of focusing on actual scares that even those 84 minutes start to drag a little. When Chris Weitz is able to settle his film into a nice atmosphere of tension and play with the strangeness of the horror elements, it mostly works, but those moments feel few and far between in a film that goes by this fast.

Then there's the bigger issue: by the third act, "Afraid" seems to lose track of the kind of horror movie it wants to be. Are we watching a film about an evil AI? Is the AI supernatural? Is there some larger cabal of human influence at work in the story? What's AIA's goal, anyway? The film rushes and stumbles on its way to try to answer all of these questions at once, and in the process answers none of them, building things to an ending that's at best convoluted and at worst nonsensical. There are so many loose ends, strange dangling elements, and plot contrivances that appear out of nowhere that you can't help but wonder if the film is so short because half the movie was left on a hard drive somewhere.

When it's working, "Afraid" plays as a standard issue, decently plotted piece of horror filmmaking populated by a likable cast and a couple of interesting ideas. The trouble is that the film is really only working about 40% of the time at best, leaving the rest an exercise in messy, frustrating sci-fi horror that's all about ideas, but not about making any actual point.

"Afraid" is now in theaters.