Horror Movie A Day: September 2024

AUGUST 30, 2024

GENRE: TECHNOLOGY
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

The nicest thing I can say about Afraid (stylized as AFRAID) is that when I was laughing at American Pie 25 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined that the co-director (Chris Weitz) and the MILF guy (John Cho) would reunite to make a horror movie about technology that didn’t even really exist at that time. We’ve all come so far from those days! Except in quality. As dated/problematic as it is at times, rewatching American Pie for the 10th time would be a better use of your time than seeing this thing once.

To be fair I only have myself to blame for bothering to be curious, as the trailer didn’t even have enough exciting footage to suggest it would be anything but a snooze. After an OK enough opening that feels like a home invasion short film, we meet our core family (Cho, Katherine Waterston, and three kids), who are all dealing with the same generic problems every movie family has. The 10ish boy is glued to his iPad instead of making friends, the 17ish daughter is being asked for n00dz from her boyfriend, mom wants to go back to work instead of just being a mom… could a magical device help with all their problems?

Of course it can. Cho works for some kind of high end marketing agency and their new client is the company behind AIA, an Alexa/Siri type device that is programmed with the most advanced AI blah blah blah. In short, at first it’s doing things like ordering food boxes to help mom with dinner prep and letting the younger kid have a little extra screen time if he does his chores, but then it starts overstepping its boundaries. And (spoiler if you haven't seen the trailer) kills the daughter’s boyfriend when he leaks one of her explicit photos. That's pretty much the only "horror movie" thing it ever really does.

Seriously, those thinking it'd get into some HAL style shenanigans will be very disappointed (even more so considering they make HAL jokes early on. He actually did some stuff!). It never puts the family in any danger, it just basically weirds them out enough that they try to get rid of it. It barely even oversteps its boundaries; when the product arrives Waterston says she doesn't want its cameras upstairs, and... well, it never has cameras upstairs. Things in this movie aren't foreshadowed as much as they're mentioned, quickly resolved, and dropped entirely. You'd think as the movie proceeded it would grow in power, Lawnmower Man style, but nope. In fact, for the climax it’s not even AIA like, sending Teslas after them to run them over or anything like that - she just convinces the people from the opening scene that Cho has kidnapped her daughter. Which suggests a better movie, where an AI device turns everyone against each other, like The Thing where the monster is a “harmless” device on the counter, but it’s the only time it feels like something dangerous could happen (and it's riddled with confusion, such as where the daughter *actually* was). Even for a PG-13, there’s a shocking dearth of genuine terror in the movie, which barely hits an 80 minute runtime to boot.

It also bizarrely uses swatting in a positive manner. For those unaware, swatting is something mostly online gamers do when they get mad at another player or a developer who does something crazy like makes the main character a girl. They get the address of whoever they’re mad at, then call the cops and tell them that there’s a hostage situation or something going on at that address. So the cops/SWAT show up and scare the hell out of the people there, who are of course innocent of any real crime. Anyway, here the kid basically swats his own home in order to get the cops there and arrest the people threatening his family. So uh… yay swatting? I guess? Weird choice.

The only time the movie ever came to life, really, was when David Dastmalchian popped up on occasion as one of the owners of the AIA technology. His character was spaced out/weird enough to give the movie some zest in those fleeting moments he was on screen, and honestly they should have bulked up the role once he was hired. It’s never clear if he had evil intentions or just let the AI tech get away from him, which is another reason the movie doesn’t really work: it’s far too vague about the tech and the people behind it to make up for the fact that AIA herself is barely doing anything malicious. I mean, Demon Seed is nearly 50 years old at this point and it had plenty of scary stuff – how is this modern day movie, at a time where AI is becoming a genuine threat to certain jobs and our ability to believe what we see online, somehow far less terrifying or even interesting?

Anyway, I hope Cho and Waterston got nice paychecks.

What say you?