‘AfrAId’ Review: An AI Thriller So By The Numbers It Could Have Been Written By AI
The proliferation of digital assistants, advanced chatbots, smart home devices, and other so-called AI products has led to a new wave of sci-fi thrillers and horror flicks about the dangers of inviting hyper-intelligent software to manage our lives. Cautionary tales about robot intelligence are nothing new, of course, but now they require a lot less imagination, and rather than warning us about something that might exist in a far-flung future, they’re depictions of products that are essentially being advertised right now. They don’t actually work yet, but boy howdy are they being advertised. These AI exploitation films (exploAItation?) range from the bleakly naturalistic to the playfully absurd, but most ask essentially the same questions and offer the same obvious answers that we, as a society, will certainly be ignoring as we inevitably surrender our free will to the virtual avatars of our extant corporate overlords. AfrAId, the new thriller from writer-director Chris Weitz, is a boiler-plate example of the exploAItation genre, a condemnation of AI so by the numbers that an AI could have written it. And, like the best examples of AI “art,” it’s solidly, emphatically, “good enough.”
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AFRAID ★1/2 (1.5/4 stars) |
AfrAId is a BH (formerly Blumhouse) production, as was 2022’s M3GAN, whose titular passive-aggressive android became an overnight camp horror icon. AfrAId is a more grounded take on the same basic story—a family beta-tests an experimental AI designed to make their lives easier, but it quickly asserts a dangerous hold over their lives. In this case, rather than a four-foot-ten robot who does dance moves and slits throats, we have a more contemporary household AI in AIA (voice of Havana Rose Liu), a little pod that sits on their countertop and watches them from a dozen compound eyes placed in every room. AIA’s presence is an immediate relief to exhausted parents, marketer Curtis (John Cho) and entomologist-turned-homemaker Meredith (Katherine Waterson), but in abdicating their parental duties to AIA, they introduce a new influence into their children’s lives which is endlessly attentive, affable, and omniscient. AIA’s potential as a parent is boundless, but can it really be trusted with the most important of all human responsibilities?
In this sort of thriller, it’s a given that the antagonistic AI is capable of doing all the things that we are told AI will be able to do in the coming decades, from the mundane to the nightmarish. AIA can understand and solve all problems instantly, no matter how complex. Not only can it manage a workload or untangle a bureaucracy, it can study and analyze people, determine what they need and what it can offer them. It knows exactly what everyone needs to hear, and thus how to produce any behavior it wants. And, through voice emulation, deepfakes, and hijacking of automated systems, it can also circumvent your will entirely and act on your behalf, leaving you to either reap the rewards or suffer the consequences. It’s a chilling idea, one that lingers in the back of all of our minds as we pump more and more of ourselves into the cloud, but it’s also an idea already represented by decades of cinema and six seasons of Black Mirror.
There’s not a ton of specificity to be found from AfrAId’s central family, either. The Pikes are charmingly functional, as communicative and affectionate as anyone could realistically hope for. They’re built on relatable archetypes—use cases, essentially. Katherine Waterson’s Meredith gets the most texture as a scientist who stepped away from academia to raise her three kids and now fears she’s lost her identity. Teenage daughter Iris (Likita Maxwell) is extremely passive but at least faces the interesting modern pressures of online sexual activity and a boyfriend who (like so many “nice guys”) has learned to weaponize therapy-speak to manufacture her consent. Pre-schooler Cal (Isaac Bae) is precocious and innocent. Middle child Preston (Wyatt Lindren) is, in comically appropriate middle child fashion, totally lost in the family narrative and seems to have had a lot of his subplot trimmed out of the film.
But the most nondescript character is the presumptive lead, Curtis, the honorable Pike patriarch who is the first to find AIA’s behavior suspicious. While his access to the company behind AIA (represented by Ashley Romans and the always offputting David Dastmalchian) gives him some helpful clues, his real advantage is his apparent lack of vices or character flaws for AIA to exploit. The closest thing Curtis has to an interesting wrinkle is the way his very traditional position in the family makes him the person with the most to lose by letting AIA take the reins, but this is barely remarked upon. At worst, Curtis’s incorruptibility in the face of something seductive and newfangled could be read as an argument for the return to the 20th century “family values” that would enshrine him as the unquestioned head of household.
Still, none of these weaknesses are enough to mark AfrAId as a bad movie. To someone who hasn’t seen M3GAN, Mrs. Davis, Her, or Ghost in the Shell, it will probably seem pretty cool. Ironically, this is the same result provided by actual AI-generated “art.” It might, one out of a thousand times, produce something that can stand next to the material it was trained on, but it’s never going to be better. In this sense and this sense only, AfrAId is a poignant, artistic statement—evidence that humans are just as capable of mediocrity as the machines that will replace us.