Curtis and his family are selected to test a revolutionary new home device: a digital family assistant called AIA. Taking smart home to the next level, once the unit and all its sensors and cameras...
My stance on AI and the use of AI has been established through a couple of movie reviews already from the past few months so you’d assume I’d be cautious in what “AfrAId” was presenting. And you’d be right…..but really, I knew this was going to go one of two ways.
For a fraction of a second, it came close to surprising me before removing the veil and revealing its true self: defective.
Either Chris Weitz was putting his marbles in the wrong basket or he was actively handicapped at every turn because this felt as amateurish and basic one’s direction can get. Every motion felt filtered, choreographed from miles or janky in his execution. Horror isn’t his forte and you can tell that just from watching.
Javier Aguirresrobe, at the very least, anchors down the fort with cinematography that’s sturdy enough; it can get away with being competently shot but the editing feels unacceptably substandard that it almost nullifies it. Speaking of being nullified, the production design might as well be an afterthought as there were only two separate times that it used its setting and lighting to actively convey the characters’ inner thoughts in contribution to the events happening around them; you can’t convince me the rest didn’t feel arbitrary. Musical score fits the spectrum you’d hear in this type of environment (despite me not remembering one single track) while it’s extremely short runtime and confused pacing go along as a package deal, hampering the other.
But because of what happens at the very end, I’m convinced the film would’ve been better off being half an hour longer to give the presentation more time to carve some kind of identity out for itself.
It’s remarkable that I don’t really hate any of the characters; they all have distinct little quirks that barely help identify them and despite their dialogue coming off forced and clunky, they’re functional enough to not be too offensive. Although I am surprised the film made me chuckle as much as it did.
While “Atlas” tried and failed to paint A.I in a complicated but meaningful light (a tool that can be useful in the right hands but abhorrent when carelessly or maliciously misused), AfrAId opts to go for a more simple route…..but fails just the same. It plays out like a misguided reboot of that Disney Channel Original Movie “Smart House” (if you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about); so much of it feels derivative of other killer AI films and between its botched execution and misshapen ideas going south, it clearly has a problem in trying to pretend it’s not just a relic of a time gone by. Barely having much ground to stand on outside its concept alone, it annoyingly cuts too many corners just to make the due date on a simple assignment.
The immediate danger with AI isn’t so much about it going rogue more than it is….being used to make life unrecognizable and uncomfortable for everyone and for a while, it felt like the film was making a conscious effort to understand and voice those concerns. A lot of scenes built themselves up to accurately showcase what people in the modern day are actually afraid of about Al between harvesting and misinterpreting personal data, paranoia about faked info and over-surveillance on security; the information is delivered rather bluntly but it gives off the impression of taking a productive stance. But then a switch clicks on, and it remembers it’s supposed to be a horror film so the film completely course-corrects itself during the entire second act to crowbar in as many formulaic horror beats under the sun and in doing so, fails to generate any actual tension. Attaching itself to an emoji-laden home invasion gimmick while abandoning its drama doesn’t do any wonders for itself either because every scene feels so weightless and disjointed, you feel like the plot’s making itself up as it’s going along.
So much of this movie takes an age to get going—scratch that—it never really gets going and it finishes in such an incredibly clumsy, mind-melting fashion that honestly begs to be seen to be believed. Everything about how this film ended literally punched me in the face and left my jaw hanging open, mentally screaming “What the fuck?” Genuinely, this is par for the course for Blumhouse films nowadays but even Disney Channel Original Movies clear up their loose ends more competently than this.
I’m beginning to wonder if there’s even a right way to properly convey the central concept of AI overstepping boundaries in a horror film without making an ass out of yourself.
