AfrAId (2024, dir. Chris Weitz)

by Jack Martin | Sep 1, 2024

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 84 mins

UK Distributor: Sony Pictures

UK Release Date: 30 August 2024

WHO’S IN AFRAID?

John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, David Dastmalchian, Keith Carradine, Riki Lindhome, Greg Hill, Ben Youcef, Wyatt Lindner, Isaac Bae

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Chris Weitz (director, writer, producer), Jason Blum and Andrew Miano (producers), Javier Aguirresarobe (cinematographer), Tim Alverson and Priscilla Nedd-Friendly (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A new smart home AI causes trouble for its family…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON AFRAID?

AI is an easy explanation for anything lacking in creativity, which is partly why you’ll nowadays often find critics hyperbolically writing about how films they don’t like were written not by human screenwriters, but by soulless machines that have learned solely from other sources. Personally, I do not like to use this put-down in my own writing (which, I’m ashamed to admit, I have done myself more than once in recent reviews). Not only is it extremely detrimental and frankly rather insulting to the actual writers who probably worked exceptionally hard to even finish the first draft of their screenplay, but it’s such a lazy way of dismissing sub-par creativity by simply accrediting it to an inhuman source rather than just simply, I don’t know, acknowledging that real people just wrote/made a terrible movie.

There are exceptions to this, though. Sometimes, you come across a movie so terrible in almost every aspect, from the dialogue to the direction to the performances to the pacing and well beyond, that it’s extremely difficult to not imagine someone typing a mere prompt into ChatGPT – the prompt in this instance being, “create a M3GAN rip-off that is written and directed by the bastard love child of M. Night Shyamalan and Charlie Brooker” – and a movie like AfrAId (as I guess it’s officially being styled as) being the manufactured result.

It therefore gives me no pleasure to speculate that this movie – inexplicably from Oscar-nominated writer and director Chris Weitz – was indeed concocted by AI, since no functioning human could make a film so devoid of suspense, common sense, and a basic understanding of how to actually make a movie.

As in M3GAN – which also shares Jason Blum as a producer – the film takes place in a near-future where AI is, of course, all the rage. Marketing executive Curtis (John Cho) is one day approached by David Dastmalchian (in a suit and hairstyle that makes him look like he’s about to lead an Oliver Tree tribute act) who is a representative for a revolutionary new smart home AI named AIA (voiced by Havana Rose Liu). Curtis is invited to test it out at his own home, where AIA quickly befriends his wife Meredith (Katherine Waterson) and their three kids, including teen daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell). Naturally, though, it isn’t long before AIA goes well beyond her programming, often to deadly means as she makes sinister steps to protect her family.

There are so many instances where you can spot exactly where AI could well have adopted full creative control over this film, with Weisz – who has previously proved himself a fairly competent filmmaker with movies like About a Boy, A Better Life and Operation Finale – executing a whole bunch of ludicrous twists and turns that already make absolutely zero sense with the awkward stiltedness of a low-budget B-movie from the 50s. Because of this, nobody in this movie ever acts like a regular person, saying things that would sound weird coming out of an actual human, doing things that are downright irresponsible in any other universe (regardless of whether or not it helps save the day), and above all not even having the head capacity to piece together all the red flags that this out-of-control AI is signalling from the moment it is introduced. Part of that is down to a number of wooden performances by an otherwise talented cast, who all play indefinable characters that barely scrape beyond their singular dimension, as well as down to Weisz directing them to say some jaw-droppingly dreadful lines like they’re reading them for the first time.

Everything else about this movie feels so off, from the suspiciously neat way that it’s shot to the bizarrely fast-paced editing that sends the movie speeding towards an anti-climactic finish after 70-odd minutes (not including credits), that it’s not that difficult to forget that it’s also meant to be a horror film, since you’re focused far more on all the strange filmmaking choices than on actually being scared. Then again, AfrAId is barely a horror movie to begin with, since beyond a small handful of cheap jump scares – including one in the obligatory fake-out dream sequence – that aspect is severely played down. Sure, there are some creepy shots of certain menacing figures, some of them in front of a barely explained motif involving an RV, but they’re acting no less weird than the main characters themselves, who again swap unnaturalistic dialogue via performances that seem to be aiming for quirky but come off as irritating.

Given the amount of talent involved both in front of and behind the camera, it’s entirely possible that this movie started out as one thing, then was radically altered by the powers that be in order to piggyback off the success of M3GAN. Of course, there’s no way to prove that beyond simple theory, but it would explain so much about how AfrAId feels so haphazardly put together despite all these names attached to it, many of whom deserve far better than the pure AI-generated slop that they’ve been given to polish up. And I have to reiterate, I do not enjoy accusing films like this of being made by AI, because putting aside what you may think of the overall film, making such an accusation always undermines the actual human skill that went into creating it.

Not in this case, though. AfrAId is a movie about AI that feels like it was made by AI, and most likely was made for nobody but AI, only so that it may analyse this movie and then use whatever its findings are to generate a better version of this script.

SO, TO SUM UP…

AfrAId is a shockingly bad AI-themed horror that is never scary, fully nonsensical, and features such awkward filmmaking, writing and acting that one might believe that the movie itself was AI-generated.