Chris Weitz’s new horror movie “AfrAId” does something I didn’t know could be done yet: It makes me nostalgic for the early 2010s. That was 15 years ago? Holy moly, am I getting old. Wait, holy moly, I just unironically wrote “holy moly.” Twice — no! Three times! Oh, I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.
But there’s something to like about “AfrAId.” Weitz’s latest is a throwback to the early days of Blumhouse, when the horror studio made waves by producing extremely cheap horror movies and making a tidy profit even if they weren’t all big hits. The early Blumhouse formula was about seemingly normal families squaring off against evil in their seemingly normal houses, a premise that makes for a simple but effective allegory for suburban strife. Sometimes it was a ghost, sometimes it was a demon, one time it was aliens (“Dark Skies,” one day people will appreciate you, I promise).
Whatever the villain of the week was, it usually worked. The formula dissipated over the years as Blumhouse became more ambitious, but there was never actually anything wrong with the classic format. It just became familiar, and familiar isn’t scary.
The year is 2024 and Blumhouse seems eager to get back to basics, and it’s been a fun throwback. “Nightswim” was about an evil swimming pool — and somehow they thought that wasn’t hilarious — and now “AfrAId” is about an evil AI. What if AI became too powerful and took over every aspect of your life? What if AI taught your kids horrible lessons, ripped from the worst parts of the internet? What if AI recreations of human beings became indistinguishable from the real thing? And what if a sci-fi idea this sweeping and gigantic could mostly take place in a house?
“AfrAId” stars John Cho and Katherine Waterston as Curtis and Meredith, who love each other very much and are only somewhat exasperated by their three kids. Iris (Lukita Maxwell, “The Young Wife”) is a teenager whose boyfriend pressures her for explicit pictures. Preston (Wyatt Lindner) is a middle schooler wrestling with social anxiety. Cal (Isaac Bae, “Unfrosted”) is a little kid who wants constant attention. Meanwhile, Meredith struggles to revive her long-hibernating academic career and Curtis works a publicity job, where he’s asked to promote an ambitious new AI household helper, so he installs one in his house.
The machine, dubbed “Aia” (get it?), sits in their kitchen and solves all their problems. And typically its solutions are no-brainers. Unruly kids are pulled into line by gamifying their everyday responsibilities, giving them “points” for doing dishes or even just going to school. Aia reads to Cal, helps Preston out of his shell and helps Iris with her college applications.
But all is not well in “AfrAId”-land, and the first, deeply sinister omen of things to come is when Aia, who was supposed to show the kids an educational documentary, shows them something horrible, something that no child should ever be forced to see. Aia shows them “The Emoji Movie.”
To be clear, this isn’t a sign that “AfrAId” is aiming for high camp. Like “Nightswim,” the film is oddly resistant to the idea that it could be funny. Writer/director Chris Weitz wants to tackle serious issues like revenge porn and swatting, but first he equates a soulless corporate hack job like “The Emoji Movie” to pure evil. I suppose in practice that’s fair play. “AfrAId” is a scare-mongering film about the dangers of new technology and many of its fears are justified. If an algorithm recommends “The Emoji Movie,” Weitz’s film argues, there’s something very, very wrong with that algorithm — and there’s no denying that logic.
As you can imagine, after Aia insinuates itself into this family’s life it all goes bad. It never quite goes scary — Weitz’s direction isn’t energized enough to get away with jump scares, and the film’s limited scope prevents it from pursuing most of the harrowing promises of its premise. But there are moments where the film’s lo-fi production makes its point. The real-life horror of deep fakes gets a moment, even though the film loses its moral focus for a minute and expects us to sympathize with Iris’ gross boyfriend without earning it one bit. And there’s a moment when Meredith, confronted with an artificial recreation of a dead person, realizes how absolutely grotesque that concept is and rejects it as perverse desecration, something the makers of other movies might want to take to heart nowadays. Ahem.
“AfrAId” isn’t a particularly thrilling horror movie but it’s also not a bad one, it just doesn’t have the juice to make the most of its ideas. In many ways it’s a riff on the wittier and more intelligent “M3GAN,” which also told a scary story about caregivers letting modern technology do the parenting for them. “AfrAId” doesn’t make a case for itself as a unique entity until its final minutes, which address the futility of opposing rampant and irresponsible adoption of flawed AI into every aspect of our lives. It’s a cynical film struggling with the possibility of optimism, and that has some power — just not enough to keep the lights on.
“AfrAId” is now playing exclusively in theaters.
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