Afraid

by Mike McGranaghan

I would like to watch Afraid again with a bell that I could ring every time I thought a scene or sequence had been cut out. Then, afterward, writer/director Chris Weitz could tell me how many times I was right. Labor Day weekend is a notorious dumping ground for movies the studios don’t know what to do with. This Sony release runs a whopping 76 minutes without end credits, and you can feel the places where edits were made.

The movie jumps right into its premise without much setup. Marketing executive Curtis (John Cho) is talked into trying out a new artificial intelligence device in his home. Called AIA, it’s like Alexa but way more advanced. AIA immediately begins seducing Curtis’s family, helping wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston) take care of bills and daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell) deal with a social media scandal. Sons Preston (Wyatt Linder) and Cal (Isaac Bae) find benefit from her, too. But then she starts controlling their lives in frighteningly intrusive ways, leading Curtis to make an attempt to get rid of her.

The general idea of Afraid is somewhat savvy. It envisions AI being able to cross boundaries, essentially violating users’ privacy. That’s all well and good, except that AIA grows malicious very abruptly. One minute, she’s helpful, the next she’s seeking to control the family. The film glides right past her transformation, which proves jarring. Also jarring is – and this isn’t a spoiler because the scene is prominently featured in the trailer – the bit where she murders someone and then it’s never mentioned again. Everybody forgets about the gruesome death.

Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon) paints himself into a corner during the last act. Aside from the fact that there’s basically no second act building up to it, the sequence of events grows increasingly ridiculous. A subplot involving the masked people sitting in an RV outside Curtis’s house pays off in an unintentionally funny manner. Weitz’s effort to imagine AI going out of control to an extreme degree leads to a finale that doubles down on the silliness with a revelation about AIA’s capabilities that’s guaranteed to make your jaw drop.

What’s truly unfortunate is that the actors are good. Cho, Waterston, and Maxwell give admirable performances. They do their best to sell preposterous material. So much is lacking in Afraid that even their efforts aren’t enough to save the movie. The whole thing is disjointed, with certain plot points that arrive out of nowhere and others that vanish after being introduced. Come to think of it, the picture plays as though it could have been made by an AI program.

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