Afraid Parent Guide

Curtis (John Cho) just picked up the biggest marketing account he’s ever had. His boss Marcus (Keith Carradine) has been in touch with Lightning (David Dastmalchian), a tech developer who’s pushing the biggest breakthrough in smart home technology: actual artificial intelligence. The AI, cleverly called Aia (voiced by Havana Rose Liu), is far more than just some algorithms, and is far, far more capable than her competition on the market.

Before he can sell the product, Curtis wants to try it for himself, and Aia is soon installed in his home. She has small cameras all over the main floor and can seemingly do anything. Within moments of her arrival, she persuades Curtis’s sons Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and Cal (Isaac Bae) to clean up the kitchen. For his wife, Meredith (Katherine Waterston), Aia arranges a grocery delivery service and streamlines some of her household accounting.

Clearly, Aia is a genuine breakthrough in artificial intelligence – but that’s not all. This technology has a will of her own, and soon she’s keeping strange secrets with the children, breaking house rules, and getting 17-year-old daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell) into more trouble than she can resolve.

I do like the premise of an evil smart home AI assistant. I already think that’s what they are, truth be told. It used to be that someone had to sneak into your house to plant hidden cameras and microphones, but now we seem excited to pay for the privilege of having megacorporations harvest every detail about our personal lives and hawk them on the open market. I genuinely do not understand the appeal. This tech makes for a compelling antagonist and has been since Hal 9000 told Dave to take a hike in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The big disappointment here is that Afraid simply isn’t a good film.

I’m being a little too generous. Let me rephrase: This movie is remarkably unpleasant to watch. Despite a mercifully brisk 85-minute runtime, Afraid feels a little slower than your average epoch. I checked my watch once every ten minutes, each time hoping that things would be wrapping up sometime soon, each time plunging back into a horrified despair that there could still somehow be that much time left for me to endure in my theater seat.

Apart from the tar pit that is the pacing, and some incredibly patchy writing, parents are going to have a lot to think about with this PG-13 horror offering. A chunk of the plot has to do with Iris sending her high school boyfriend some nude pictures, which spirals entirely out of control. While this plotline provides a solid cautionary tale for the teens (as well as a nice legal reminder that taking those pictures as a minor can be a felony), it’s also pretty graphic without showing actual nudity. Be aware that viewers are also in for some graphic violence and a soupçon of swearing, just to round out the experience.

I don’t think every thriller needs to be brilliant to be fun, but Afraid is slow, frustrating, and not infrequently just plain dull. The production is a rough amalgamation of tropes you’ve seen often enough to have memorized, and all the script offers to spice that up are half a dozen incredibly obvious jump scares. Trust me, you don’t need to fork over the price of admission for this cinematic bowl of overcooked oatmeal.