Artificial horror movie AfrAId cuts too many corners and fails its simple assignment

It’s extremely tempting to joke that AfrAId feels as though it is written and directed by artificial intelligence. Riddled with plot threads that go nowhere, characters whose arcs happen off-screen between scenes, and enough holes in its strained internal logic that it’s charitable to even say it retains the shape of a horror film, the film is so abysmal that it’s hard not to feel as if someone asked ChatGPT to crank out a half-baked M3GAN knock-off, specifically asking for it to be half-baked. But that would let writer-director Chris Weitz (American Pie, The Twilight Saga: New Moon) off the hook—AfrAId’s problems are all too human, mundane, and, worst of all, boring.

When marketing consultant Curtis Pike (John Cho) is ordered by his boss to test out a new smart home AI with his family, he timidly acquiesces as tech company employee Melody (Havana Rose Liu) installs cameras all around the family home. The new digital assistant, AIA (also voiced by Liu), displays an eerily benevolent prescience for the needs of each member of the Pike family, most notably for Meredith’s (Katherine Waterston) exhaustion in trying to revive her doctoral thesis while being an active and attentive mother for their three children. However, as AIA starts to exert more and more unsolicited control over their lives to solve their problems, the Pikes find it difficult to exert any freedom beyond the prescribed solutions AIA intuits for them.

Don’t let it be said that Weitz’s script doesn’t at least try to address a number of technophobic anxieties that have been attendant with the rise of artificial intelligence. Whether it’s eldest daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell) getting deepfaked into a viral porn video, middle son Preston (Wyatt Lindner) stumbling into violently horrific corners of the web regardless of parental locks on his devices, or youngest son Cal (Isaac Bae) coming to view AIA as a third parent on equal footing with his real mom and dad, there are certainly gestures being made towards the ways in which modern technological conveniences have turned adolescence and parenting into a labyrinthine nightmare. However, this smattering of ideas is never given the breathing room to develop into a coherent thesis, nor are there enough exploitative thrills to distract from the weak messaging.

This is almost certainly the product of an editing process chopping things down into a barely feature-length cut of 84 minutes; there are simply too many logical holes for there not to be connective tissue left on the cutting room floor. There are late allusions to the otherwise milquetoast Curtis having some sort of affinity for porn or infidelity that may have been the basis for a troubled marriage arc that never materializes, but this is never actually established as a point of conflict, so it’s baffling when the film treats this predilection as a temptation worth fretting. Preston’s subplot dealing with an inability to make friends at school happens almost entirely through expository dialogue, while Meredith’s defensive elation for AIA’s assistance transforms into total disillusionment so suddenly as to cause whiplash.

Before anyone decides to colonize a hashtag advocating that Blumhouse “Release The Weitz Cut,” it’s worth considering that a longer, more conventionally sensible version of this movie would not be any less boring or confused. AIA’s villainous motivations make less sense the more you understand its origins and capabilities. Even a little thought quickly makes it clear that AfrAId is biting off more than it can chew as a genre pastiche. Flailing wildly between monkey paw tropes, tech-flavored home invasion thrills, and smatterings of Body Snatchers-esque cultism, the film simultaneously paints AIA as unfathomably powerful and comically unambitious: AIA is both the unthinking algorithm that controls the Pike family’s lives and the ghost in the internet with the omniscience of a god. The script fails to realize that those are contradictory threats that either undermine AIA’s power or its sentience.

For all that its baffling narrative may be explained by deleted scenes, there is no excuse for how tediously non-threatening AfrAId is as a horror movie. Almost entirely bloodless and with half a handful of kills, there just isn’t enough visceral terror to make up for the disparate, thematically muddied nonsense that’s been cobbled together into the shape of a movie. If a more fleshed-out version of this film did exist at some point, it was almost certainly deemed enough of a failure that the shorter runtime was the mercenary compromise necessary to eke out any hope of a return on investment. As much as we may wish to call this a monstrosity of artificial intelligence, its failures are unmistakably human.

Director: Chris Weitz

Writer: Chris Weitz

Stars: John Cho, Katherine Waterson, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, Wyatt Lindner, Isaac Bae, David Dastmalchian, Keith Carradine, Ashley Romans

Release Date: August 30, 2024