‘Afraid’ Review: AfrAId Of Breaking The Mold

Blumhouse’s latest film Afraid tackles one of society’s most recent nightmarish breakthroughs. Advanced AI technology. Though, the film could’ve been written by a chatbot itself.

This review will contain some spoilers for Afraid.

On the surface, while exploring these new tools introduced to the wider public through the lense of a (not so) science-fiction horror film could serve as an excellent warning sign for what is to come, the movie devolves into a much more generic story by the time the credits roll.

The film follows Curtis (John Cho), a marketing professional, and his family as they take a new AI smart assistant named AIA on a trial run so Curtis can learn more about the product to help the company behind it effectively sell it to the masses.

Of course, this AI has other plans because its data set included the entire internet and it decides it doesn’t like people (not too dissimilar to Ultron in the second Avengers film). But alas a chatbot can only get so far and needs people in the real world to do real damage. This comes in the form of some people in an RV wearing masks with the scariest image imaginable (an evil smiley face). 

Across the board, the performances are pretty decent. Before seeing the film I had no idea David Dastmalchian had a role, he always plays a perfect freak and that rings true still here. Outside of some thematically relevant AI-generated slop images, the movie looks pretty standard for a C-Tier Blumhouse horror film.

Most of my main issues stem from the physical threat of the masked people. Near the beginning of the film someone mentions the physical merging of robotics and humans, so I assumed we were going to get some freaky body horror elements. 

Unfortunately that would’ve been too creative for this movie. Instead (spoilers if you care), the masked people were simply convinced by the AI that the family was kidnapping children? This reveal sucked everything interesting the movie could’ve done and is just the most boring choice the creatives could have made.

That about sums up the entire movie really, just uninspired and uncreative. 

Afraid is written and directed by Chris Weitz and stars John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, David Dastmalchian, Keith Carradine, Lukita Maxwell, and Riki Lindhome. Columbia Pictures and Blumhouse Productions have produced the film. The movie is distributed by Sony Pictures and is now in theaters.

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