Afraid review: Artificial intelligence, stupid movie

Ten years ago, Spike Jonze imagined a delicious romance between a man and his breathing operating system. How sweet, how strange, how 2014. But the honeymoon is over, and the mysterious ambivalence of Her seems quite out of step with the cynical spirit of our new age, defined by a growing distrust of Silicon Valley “visionaries” and their supposedly miraculous toys. So now we have Afraid (the emphasis here is on the “AI” at the end of the title), a cheap and ridiculous Blumhouse potboiler that plays like a Bluetooth Fatal Attraction. Just in time for the holidays (that is, the Birthday of Skynet becoming self-aware), it more or less reboots Her’s disembodied love interest as a demented stalker – always watching, always listening, issuing thinly veiled threats in the soothing voice of a smart speaker. What a technophobic difference a decade makes.

The voice of the malevolent machine actually comes from Melody (Havana Rose Liu), a friendly representative from an emerging tech company beta-testing its latest virtual assistant. AIA isn’t much to look at: Its design – a glowing orb encased in gray gauze and set atop arched legs – is the film’s first crack in credibility, and may leave you longing for the elegant simplicity of the HAL-9000 or any Apple product. But what AIA lacks in beauty, it more than makes up for in brains. It is artificially intelligent in the classic sense of the word – not a program that rattles off pirated material, but a cluster of code with a mind of its own. Alexa is a total dunce by comparison.

Paid by the company to give the technology a try, marketing maven Curtis (John Cho) hooks it up at home and watches with growing discomfort as it “bonds” with his wife, Meredith (Katherine Waterston), and their three children. Suddenly, a family with fairly rigid rules about screen time is relying on an automated secretary for help with everything from meal planning to college admissions essays. But how much initiative is too much? Automating grocery ordering is one thing. Elaborately staging an unsympathetic friend’s suicide in retaliation for revenge porn is quite another.

Afraid is essentially a yuppie-in-danger thriller, where the threat is an overzealous chatbot. Seeing actors so good commit to such silly material lands somewhere between sad and inspiring; Cho and Waterston never let on that they’re stuck in a simulated domestic drama, delivering realistic emotional responses to the absurdities that pile up in Afraid like pop-ups on a corrupted desktop. The film isn’t entirely bereft of ideas, but it does have a point to make about technological convenience as a Faustian pact: you fly past a lot of ethical boundaries if you take the AI ​​shortcut. But there’s also an irony algorithmic about Afraid, which feels like a horror movie working with a dataset of disturbing headlines. If you retweeted a news story about deep fakes or ChatGPT, you may have inadvertently contributed to the research portion of the screenwriting process.

Blumhouse covered much of this ground last year with more style, humor, and sly insights. M3GAN. Of course, that film had the benefit of a mobile, physically embodied villain, as opposed to a speech synthesizer with an attitude. It’s not so easy to get the creeps from a glorified Amazon Echo. Which is probably why Afraid also introduces an external threat in the form of an RV-dwelling gang of wannabe Strangerswith glitching digital masks and prowling around the periphery of the plot. The explanation for their role, when it finally arrives, is so ridiculous that it threatens to short-circuit the entire film. It doesn’t help that Chris Weitz, Hollywood’s man of all genres who American pie, a sequel to TwilightAnd The Golden Compassis the one behind the camera. He gives the footage a gloomy, cloudy anti-glare that makes you want to loudly ask Siri to adjust the brightness and contrast.

What’s truly troubling about AI is the trust so many have placed in it. It probably won’t become conscious and take over the world. But it could take your job or give you deadly health advice or send a self-driving car into a school zone. By making AI a godlike force capable of manipulating anything with a Wi-Fi connection, Afraid ultimately reinforces the tech industry’s fantasy that AI is a genie’s bottle, limitless in its power and usefulness. In that sense, the film is about as scary as a tweet from Elon Musk.