By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring John Cho, Katherine Waterston and Lukita Maxwell
Written and directed by Chris Weitz
Columbia/Blumhouse
It wasn’t a positive sign when AFRAID went unscreened for critics (by the studio that did show TAROT in advance), after the movie had been delayed for a full year from its original August 2023 release date. At that point, it was called THEY LISTEN, and the fact that it’s mostly one “character” doing the listening in the final film hints that significant changes were wrought along the way.
As does AFRAID itself. The premise is certainly topical and offered plenty of possibilities, tackling the thorny technological issue of AI, which can be a great help in some situations and an equally significant problem in others. Writer/director Chris Weitz, making his first horror feature after a career largely encompassing comedy (and, um, THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON), has the right idea here, and the setup is pretty good. Curtis (John Cho) is a marketing executive and family man tasked by his boss (Keith Carradine in an amusing turn) with testing a potential client’s revolutionary new product, AIA, an artificial-intelligence “home assistant.” Curtis and his wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston) could use some assistance managing their three kids, teenage Iris (Lukita Maxwell), middle schooler Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and little Cal (Isaac Bae), all wrestling with their own issues.
AIA, speaking with the friendly, here-to-help voice of Havana Rose Liu, is soon like another member of the family, though Meredith initially refuses to allow her wall-mounted minicams on the second floor, where the bedrooms are. AIA, of course, can get into all their phones, tablets, etc., and in the early going, AFRAID preys nicely on current fears of our personal devices being infiltrated by outsiders. For a while, though, it isn’t so much a horror film as a paranoid thriller, and Weitz takes an old-fashioned, unemphatic approach. With a hushed soundscape and underplaying evidently encouraged among the cast, the film has a different feel from the usual run of cyberthrillers that emphasize flash and more aggressive filmmaking.
The movie also gets into some affecting territory too, in the subplot involving Iris and her all-too-common on-line problems, and a scene playing on Meredith’s ongoing mourning of her late father. And as first hinted in an opening montage, Weitz gets at the potentially potent idea that an AI “raised” amidst the frequent hostility of the Internet would unavoidably be corrupted by it. Yet as the movie goes on, it fails to build up a head of steam, either dramatically or in terms of the thrill content. Weitz’s evident desire, from the way he handles the individual scenes, to slow-burn his way through a building sense of unease is undercut by equally evident postproduction trimming. The movie runs only 77 minutes plus credits, and the second half jumps from one scene to the next as if only the most absolutely necessary ones mattered. Key moments aren’t followed up on, and others don’t receive sufficient explanation or explication.
Among these are a subplot set up by the opening scene, which feels like it was originally a larger part of the narrative but now comes across like an awkward intrusion into the main story. And the emphasis on character in the first half gets short-shrifted in the later going’s rush to wrap things up. It’s a shame, since Cho (who previously navigated the on-line suspense of the more engaging SEARCHING) and Waterston have a lived-in chemistry and persuasively handle Curtis and Meredith’s alternately changing attitudes toward AIA. The young actors all do well with their fairly limited screen time, and it’s fun to have the ubiquitous David Dastmalchian on hand as the eccentric “Lightning,” one of AIA’s handlers. Everyone involved, in fact, clearly took the project seriously, which makes it more of a shame that the final product doesn’t live up to its potential.
