‘AfrAId’ is Admirably Mindless [Review]

To start, AfrAId is a new genre movie that is currently in theaters, from Blumhouse Productions and Sony/Columbia Pictures. Written and directed by Chris Weitz, AfrAId is technically a horror movie, but in my opinion, is more so just a standard thriller.  I went to a movie theater to see AfrAId. Yes, that’s right. I paid to go see an hour and twenty-minute PG-13 thriller which at first glance, seemed like the most forgettable and simple-minded movie imaginable. When I told myself that beforehand, I knew I had no choice, I had to see this movie, and I had to see it in a movie theater.

This decision-making process forced me to step back and take an introspective look at myself, which is when I realized I have a devastatingly hateful heart, and that I was going to AfrAId so that I could see it fail first-hand. This realization ripped me to shreds. Going to the movies is bar-none my favorite thing to do, and I was going to this sacred place, where we go to laugh, cry and care, with the intention of rooting for a movie to fail miserably. I would then turn around and bash it, bash the industry, so-on and so-on. I was beside myself already, and then lights came down, and the show was underway…

Trailers are ruining movies

Okay, for those of you who frequent movie theaters, especially for genre movies, I’m sure you have seen the Speak No Evil remake trailer quite a few times now. Probably going to be a great movie, but I know that trailer by heart at this point, even though it is about two-and-a-half minutes long. I just really wish that this trailer didn’t show so much of what will make the movie shocking and exciting. It gives away a lot of stuff, way too much good stuff that would have worked so well experiencing while watching the actual movie, not a trailer. So that had me flustered and shaking my head already.

After the Speak No Evil trailer came the un-edited, much maligned, trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Which for starters, that title is a real mouthful. The Megalopolis trailer begins with receipts of famous film critics from the past taking jabs at Coppola’s earlier and historic filmography, upon release at the time. The intention of this being that nobody could possibly understand the genius of Coppola until years after the fact, which leads me to believe that Megalopolis is a giant mess, will continue to be ridiculed, and the marketing team is leaning into the “you just don’t get it now, but you will eventually” mantra. I haven’t seen it obviously, so I have no idea if it’s the greatest movie of all time or a terrible mess, but I don’t appreciate this predetermined notion being planted in my brain before I even see the movie.

That trailer raised a lot of red flags for me and made me feel even worse about where the industry is at the moment considering there is a trailer where Francis Ford Coppola, a living legend, is taking jabs at film critics who are mostly dead and buried at this point in order to promote a movie. Worst of all, this trailer is leading into a seemingly mindless movie that potentially could have been written by a computer program. So yeah, my psyche was in complete shambles at this point, and then the movie finally began…

What’s happening to Blumhouse?

But before we get to the movie itself, let’s quickly talk about Blumhouse. Now, I’ve ranted about this before, but here we go again. Blumhouse has made incredible movies, there is no doubt about that whatsoever. They revolutionized how movies, specifically horror movies, are made (for cheap), marketed (wisely) and released wide (making tons of money). Not to forget, the seemingly endless freedom they were providing to filmmakers who didn’t need a monster budget, they just needed creative freedom and confidence. And it worked. It worked so unbelievably well for a good amount of time. But as of late, Blumhouse has done an incredible disservice to the horror community with a slew of botched reboots. Examples include the disgraceful Halloween trilogy and the disastrous (yet mildly enjoyable) The Exorcist: Believer, as well as original, yet so unoriginal, movies like Night Swim and Imaginary. Of course, among the litany of stinkers there are a few success stories, both financially (Five Nights at Freddy’s) and critically (Sick).

I will say, it is very admirable to green light some of these movies, see them through, and then release them widely. But the Blumhouse that we knew and loved in the 2010s seems to have totally lost its way in the 2020s, for the most part. Whether it be questionable quotes from Jason Blum on the Paranormal Activity franchise, specifically regarding Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, which I actually thought was quite good, in turn essentially decapitating the franchise that made them a real financial powerhouse in the genre, or the bastardization of Michael Myers, there seems to be a disconnect between what Blumhouse thinks the audience wants, straying from what had worked so well in the past. With a good docket of movies on the horizon though, Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man, films from Jaume Collet-Serra, Christopher Landon and Scott Derickson, and of course, bringing Mike Flanagan, who in my opinion is currently the horror filmmaker making the most interesting stuff, on board to give CPR treatment to The Exorcist franchise that Blumhouse paid an ungodly sum for, and totally blew it with Believer. Good times are most likely coming, hopefully…

Did You Know? Wicked Horror TV Has Classic and Independent Horror Films Available to Stream for Free!

AfrAId is as basic as it gets. But is that a bad thing?

AfrAId is your run-of-the-mill thriller about an artificial intelligence system, like Alexa, that takes over a family’s life and wreaks havoc on them, and everyone else as well. The dangers of AI being the thematic focus of a movie goes all the way back to 2001: A Space Odyssey (actually referenced by the characters in AfrAId), the underrated Disney Channel Original Movie Smart House, the semi-recent and brilliant Ex Machina and of course, the very recent M3GAN.

AfrAId stars John Cho (Searching) and Katherine Waterston (Alien: Covenant) as a picturesque married couple with three kids in the Silicon Valley region. John Chu’s character, Curtis, is a marketing executive who takes on a mysterious client with an out-of-this-world new AI system that is supposedly a much smarter version of Amazon Alexa, called AIA. In order to take on this client, Curtis is forced to take on the AIA system in his home, with his family. Of course, AIA is deranged and dangerously powerful, so the family’s life is in grave danger. With plenty of hijinks along the way, where AIA really shows what she(it) can do by running down the checklist of ‘things that a home AI system can do to wreak havoc’. Deep fakes, compromising visual and audio recordings, sadistically poisoning the minds of youths, infiltrating deeply personal issues.

AfrAId runs through the entire gambit, kind of. The strong points of the plot for me were the satisfying plot twists that paid off surprisingly effectively and avoidance of diving too far into subplots or frustratingly pitting the characters against each other just for the sake of some added drama. Even though the movie as a whole was quite silly, the character motives and behavior weren’t distracting or annoying at all. AfrAId effectively introduced plot points but then didn’t go too far down the rabbit hole with any of them, which would bog it down for no real reason at all. Making for a tightly constructed, simple-minded thriller…

AfrAId succeeds in its composition

Even though the plot is as simple as they come, and the execution didn’t have a lick of ambition, I genuinely enjoyed the composition of AfrAId, and I thought its simplicity was its greatest strength. Written and directed by Chris Weitz, AfrAId is a masterclass in making an ordinary, watchable thriller. To explain, AfrAId is like a TikTok version of a movie. It’s super brief at 84 minutes in length and has zero dull exposition or character development. Everything that takes place on screen pushes the plot forward, and even though the overarching message of the movie is painstakingly on the nose, being the dangers of our dependence of AI, and AI’s omnipresence on our society as a whole, I gave it credit for just sticking to its simplicity.

AfrAId wasn’t trying to be the smartest tool in the toolshed, it was just trying to do its job, as forgettable and mind-numbingly simple as that was. One thing I’ve learned about myself, and my movie taste is that I have a deep appreciation for simple movies that are completely aware (hopefully) of their simplicity, but also aren’t annoyingly winking at the audience with that “we know this is stupid and we want you to know that we know this is stupid” type approach. In 2024, nothing has been making me angrier than the meta self-referential and self-aware nature of movies or movies (mostly from streamers) where you know it’s just one big pig pile of talent grabbing paychecks, and the product on screen oozes the collective lack of ambition and effort.

AfrAId is simplistic and forgettable. But it’s not without merit.

There’s no two ways about it, AfrAId is as basic and forgettable as they come, but I find it refreshing that a totally simplistic thriller with good actors actually trying to play likable characters, an easy enough story to follow along with and honestly, gulp, quality entertainment value, can still be released in theaters. Not everything has to be or can be a masterpiece with some super-serious thematic message. Movies like AfrAId used to be the TikTok of the movie theater industry, brief, entertaining, mindless and straight to the point. I didn’t think I would say this going in, but I find AfrAId to be an admirable effort in that regard…

Like I had mentioned, the performances in AfrAId are good enough to work very well for this movie. Cho and Waterston are incredibly likable performers, who don’t have an ounce of inauthenticity or annoying qualities in their work. It’s impossible to not like John Cho, who has been doing his thing for over twenty years now, and Katherine Waterston has great range while being unassuming but also expressive and likable as well. I’ve always been a big Waterston fan, and I’ve been 100% in on John Cho since he started the MILF chant in American Pie, played a great part in the underrated Better Luck Tomorrow and of course, starred in the stoner comedy series Harold & Kumar.

Along with Cho and Waterston, AfrAId also stars the hardest working man in horror, David Dastmalchian (Late Night with the Devil) as Lightning. Going into AfrAId, I had no idea Dastmalchian was even in this movie, so that was a pleasant surprise and of course, he delivers like always.

Along with Dastmalchian, Lakita Maxwell and Havana Rose Liu play Iris and Melody, respectively. These three are the brain trust behind the AIA technology, known as disruptors in this Silicon Valley region. All five of these leading adult performances are simple and reserved. No frills. They were paid to act, they acted, they went home. It felt like that and it probably was that. There clearly wasn’t a lot of deep character work which is totally fine. AfrAId isn’t a character piece (lol). Same goes for the group of kids who co-star in AfrAId. They were all fine. So, yeah…

Don’t expect a lot of scares from AfrAId.

AfrAId was in no way or shape scary at all. After the first scene of the movie, which we have all seen a million times, where a seemingly unrelated set of characters are introduced, the stakes are set, and the antagonist is introduced. If you were to tell AI to write an opening scene of a horror movie, the structure and beats of the AfrAId opening is most likely what that AI would pump out.

Even with AfrAId being wholly as basic as humanly(?) possible, I give Chris Weitz a lot of credit for simply just getting the job done. The locations were all pretty swanky, so the sets were relatively unique, but there was nothing visually about AfrAId that jumped off the screen. The technical proficiency in AfrAId was the simplicity of the entire composition as a whole.

This movie felt very balanced and easy to watch. There was nothing distracting whatsoever. There was hardly any wasted exposition, like I had mentioned earlier, so the props I’m giving on the technical side are strictly simple concepts and ordinary execution. Not exactly a description you would expect out of a horror movie about deep fakes and complicated AI malfunctions, but nonetheless, that’s what it was. Regarding the deep fakes and AI design, I’ve seen better, but I’ve also seen worse. There was a particularly funny sequence where the least likable character in the movie, a foil to the oldest daughter in the family, is pulled apart to shreds by AIA, in pretty much every way an AI can ruin your life. I had wished there were a few more moments like this, but more on that coming right up…

What AfrAId gets wrong:

My qualms with AfrAId are surprisingly limited. I would say that I could have used some more of AIA f**king around with more and more people in different ways than just basic blackmailing and manipulation. But AfrAId is so tightly constructed and short that it plays more like an episode of Black Mirror than a feature film. There are obviously eons more depth and darkness to Black Mirror. But with the subject matter, length and how AfrAId plays out in the end, Black Mirror might actually be a very suitable comp for AfrAId. Think of it like an Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode comparatively to a Twilight Zone episode…

AfrAId doesn’t reach for the sadistic lens to tell this story through like an Unfriended: Dark Web, but there is still a shred of darkness to it. At one point in the movie, AIA goes off on a tangent about how it was deeply impacted by the sewer that is the Internet. The more I thought about that concept, the more I found it interesting. How can we expect these AI programs to lean towards positively and good natured when the Internet is mostly a deeply dark, lonely and angry place. So much of what I liked about AfrAId is tied to that scene in particular. And not just that, AfrAId does a good job of emphasizing the sheer dependence this family in particular, but also all families, are on their technology.

Even good natured, loving families like this one in AfrAId can be quickly led astray by technological influence. For a movie of this simplitude (made up word by the way), AfrAId has a surprisingly bleak ending. Much like my reaction to the ending of The Exorcist: Believer, I was like damn! They actually went there with this. I dig it.

All in all:

I dug AfrAId. It’s not groundbreaking in any way, you’ll probably forget it right afterwards, and it probably won’t succeed financially or have any sort of legacy, but just like any TikTok video or Instagram reel that we enjoy and have been so accustomed to, AfrAId is easy to follow, entertaining and brief. A good experience at the movies. Which based on my terrible mindset going in, was quite honestly a miracle. So, to conclude, AfrAId actually had a profound impact on me. Check this one out when you get the chance…

Wicked Horror Rating: 6.5/10

From Columbia Pictures & Blumhouse Productions, AfrAId is playing exclusively in theaters as of August 30th, 2024.