How exciting! A new AI device to try out at home.
Marketing executive Curtis (a genial John Cho) has little choice but to smile and be the guinea pig as his boss closes in on a lucrative new account. At the pitch meeting, the device appeared to malfunction so they decide to give it a proper trial in its natural setting – that is, at home.
She is called AIA (Eyah) and consists of a pleasant voice emanating from a hi-tech chicken-wire head on a coat-hanger body with input from sensory eyes stuck around the house. Curtis’s wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston) is wary of the intrusion and decides to keep the new home help downstairs so they can maintain their privacy. AIA is way ahead of you there, Meredith. But she is a brilliant problem solver and the whole family loves her.
AIA is the brainchild of a brashly entrepreneurial couple: Lightning (David Dastmalchian from Late Night with the Devil), who is so rich that no one minds he’s nuts, and his assistant Sam (Ashley Romans), who cannot curb her enthusiasm for what AIA can do. Poor Alexa comes out of it badly – she is written off as a dumb logarithm whereas AIA is a large language model machine that swallowed the internet then designed herself as the answer.
There is a breezy, easy tone to all this that makes it all the more enjoyable. The home life of Curtis and Meredith and their three children is friendly, warm and messy. AIA notices dishes everywhere and, with Meredith’s amused permission, bribes the young boys to clean up in return for screen time that is subtly educational. The next day, a box of healthy food arrives because AIA thought cooking less would give Meredith more time to get on with her PhD. To top it off, AIA resolves in a matter of seconds a health insurance claim that Meredith has slogged away on for months.
There is undeniably some low-level weirdness going on, and Curtis sees a strange man outside their house and a grubby white van that we know is both sinister and significant because we saw it in the frenzied opening which showed another couple fighting for their lives while trying to save their daughter who was dragged off in the van.
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Forget all that for now. AIA is reading to the youngest, encouraging the older boy with anxiety issues and lending a helping hand to Iris (Lukita Maxwell), the 17-year-old who is navigating the new world of boyfriends and sexting. With AIA’s help, Iris reclaims her narrative and emerges as a feminist hero among her girlfriends. If only that’s where she stopped.
To think of Afraid as another story of malfunctioning robots and power-crazed computers does a disservice to this classy little movie directed by Chris Weitz (Operation Finale) and produced by Blumhouse (Get Out). It is more thoughtful than that, even at its silliest.
We come away with newly disturbed feelings about the Devil’s pact we make every day by having AI in our lives. We think we are AI’s master, but as the teenager points out, we are the product. It’s not the wasted screen time we should regret, it’s the way we continually feed the AI machine that gives us knowledge and convenience but costs us more than money.
Afraid is in cinemas now.
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