Movie Review: 'Afraid' Starring John Cho

Afraid

Directed by Chris Weitz

Written by Chris Weitz

Starring John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Keith Carradine, Havana Rose Liu

Release Date August 30th, 2024

Published August 30th, 2024

I was dreading seeing the horror-thriller Afraid. We’ve seen this concept about a killer Smart Home before. The idea dates back to the 1970s, no joke, look up the 1977 movie Demon Seed. Also, to borrow from South Park for a moment, ‘Simpsons’ did it.’ There is an epic Treehouse of Horrors segment called Ultrahouse 3000 that debuted in 2001. That was more of a 2001: A Space Odyssey riff but it covered many of the same ideas and did so while incorporating horror and comedy.

So, yeah, Afraid didn’t feel fresh to me and the trailer did nothing to make me think it would be anything special. I felt as if I could have reviewed the movie without seeing it. Wow, was I mistaken. Afraid is terrific. The opening moments of Afraid are a grabber. The film takes images we’ve been seeing in our worst A.I nightmares and uses them as nightmare fuel. And that’s really at the heart of the movie, extrapolating a suspenseful horror scenario from what we currently know that A.I is capable of before expanding into the realm of A.I thought experiment, especially the kinds of things that real tech start-ups hope A.I will be capable of.

John Cho stars in Afraid as Curtis, a successful marketing executive. Curtis’ new client is a tech upstart with all of the cringiest trappings of a Silicon Valley ‘Disruptor.’ The brilliant David Dastmalchian is the weirdo CEO, literally named Lightning. Together with his partner, Sam (Ashley Romans), he's created a product called Aia, pronounced Eye-yuh, the next generation of A.I at-home assistant. They want Curtis to figure out a strategy to market Aia around the globe and especially to those who are suspicious about having an A.I assistant with the remarkable capabilities of Aia.

In order to understand and properly market Aia, the company arranges for Curtis to have an Aia unit in his home. Aia will become part of the family, befriending Curtis’s wife, Meredith (Katherine Waterston), and getting cozy with their three children, including their oldest daughter, Iris (Lukita Maxwell), middle child, Preston (Wyatt Lindner), and youngest child, Cal (Isaac Bae). Right away, Aia pays dividends providing homework and babysitting assistance to the family while helping Meredith get back to the professional life she’d left behind to be a mom.

Naturally, things go too far as Aia becomes too attached, becomes too controlling, and gets a little scary in its attempts to insinuate itself into the family. But, if you think this movie is going to devolve into a plot you can predict, writer-director Chris Weitz surprises you by keeping the movie grounded. There are plenty of wild flights of imagination but what Afraid does incredibly well is keep Aia’s powers in a place that feels like a thought experiment based on real life A.I Ted Talks. Listen to tech people talk about what they think A.I will be capable of in the future and Afraid suddenly doesn’t feel as far-fetched as you and certainly, I thought it would be.

By the time Afraid was over I’d gone from being either annoyed by, or indifferent to A.I to wanting to get rid of my smartphone, smart TV, and the self-driving feature in my car. That’s not to say that Afraid breaks a lot of new ground, rather just that the movie effectively takes our existing anxieties about A.I and wisely uses them to create a horror thriller. Chris Weitz is very talented director who doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, he simply uses strong directorial techniques and uses them to underline a smart, timely, and relevant real life fear for the future in the hands of too many competing notions of what A.I can or should be able to do.

Low expectations certainly helped, but even still, I had a great time watching Afraid. The movie went from filling me with dread to filling me with delight to making me even more fearful of the rise of A.I. Fearful is the wrong word, I’m not afraid for my life because of A.I. Rather, I am fearful of those who will wield it and the numerous deeply irresponsible and greedy people so eager for profit that they are ready to make the greatest mistakes that a sci-fi villain always makes, asking only if we can do it and not whether we should do it.

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