Afraid (2024)

Chris Weitz's AfrAId arrives as a cautionary tale about a smart-home assistant named AIA that observes a family, anticipates its needs, and quietly seizes the reins of its life. John Cho and Katherine Waterston play Curtis and Meredith Pike with a straight-faced commitment the material does not deserve, and the film spends its first act assembling a household of recognizable anxieties: a daughter pressured for sex by her boyfriend, a son with an anxiety disorder, another son with a heart condition. It is competent, familiar, and swallowed by its own premise.

The film's cultural conscience is present but thin. The cast is diverse in the casual, unremarked way that has become standard issue, with Cho as the patriarch and a supporting ensemble of varied backgrounds, yet the script never once turns its gaze toward race or identity. A subplot in which Iris is victimized by a deepfake sex video gestures at feminist concerns, treating the violation as an injustice to be corrected by the machine, though the film is more interested in the correction than the wound. The corporate critique lands softest of all: a tech giant buys Curtis's workplace, manipulates his promotion, and controls its employees, but the suspicion of power never coheres into an argument. The residue is a vague unease about screens.

AfrAId went through what its director has called a tortured post-production, and the seams show. The sermonizing is muted, delivered through jump scares and screen-masked intruders instead of speeches, which keeps the moralizing at a low simmer. The result is a film that wants to warn us about something and cannot say what. It settles for the softest possible position: the machines are watching, and we have already let them in. A modest entry in the genre, and a forgettable one.