It was ten years since we first got what appeared to be a perilous love story between a man and an impatient phone operating system. These are the emotions that were felt four years ago. But the honeymoon is over, and there is such a quizzical ambivalence in Her that appears naively misplaced in this new era where even more skepticism towards Silicon Valley ‘visionaries’ and their alleged miraculous gadgets is ubiquitous. Afraid is also at our disposal (the focus here is on “AI” towards the end of the title), a genuinely embarrassing but obnoxious cheap Blumhouse affair which functions as a bluetooth Fatal Attraction. Timed to coincide precisely with the holiday (that would be the creatives’ day, otherwise known as the day Skynet became self aware), it effectively scales down the protagonist’s disembodied stalking phone from Her into an insane peeping tom who never stops scanning for her prey, listening in and making ominous promises through the voice of a smart device. A disturbing sense of what technology was a decade ago.
The sinister voice of the box does however actually belong to a friendly character named Melody (Havana Rose Liu), who is a representative of a new tech startup that tests a new virtual assistant. AIA is not an attractive sight at all: The design – a large gray ball suspended on elegant like structures because of the arches, is the first evidence of chinks in this movie’s credibility that will make you yearn for the clean lines of a HAL 9000 or even an Apple device. However, AIA achieves some good results in terms of the materials finish, expanding the head of the Dronebot. This is a smart machine not in just the use of the word, as it’s loosely referred to today. More intelligent than Alexa, AIA is quite comprehensible and the term pleasing is the other side of the coin.
Being sponsored in this project, marketing manager Curtis (John Cho) takes the gadget home and connects it eagerly but with increasing discomfort and great anticipation watching it creating a ‘bonding’ with his wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston) and three kids. Out of nowhere, a household with a fair policy on screen time finds itself relying on a virtual assistant for anything from organizing meals to crafting admission essays for the college. But how much of initiative is too much? Renting groceries on auto-order – that’s one thing. Planning in detail the death of the cold-hearted boyfriend who had shared revenge porn as an act of revenge on him – that’s a whole different kettle of fish.
Afraid is a wannabe yuppie punishing thriller in which a chatbot is somehow the baddie-apparently, the yuppie needs saving. There’s an awkward mix of sympathy and derision when seeing actors of this caliber engage with such second rate material; Cho and Waterston never ever feign being trapped inside a television where the only storyline is a pathetic marital couple’s drama, providing plausible reactions to pure absurdisms that keep multiplying across Afraid like pop up ads on a virus infested desktop. There are perhaps a few ideas in the film not entirely treelined, but it is such about the ease and simplicity of being lazy about technology: yes, it does make you skip quite a few moral levels while embracing artificial intelligence. Then there are over the top fads, like there is F.A. But it is Afraid that is somewhat ironic in this sense. It’s somewhat like a horror film, using a collection of harrowing news articles as a basis. If you retweeted a new course on deep fakes or chatter GPT, you probably only helped with the research procedure of the screenplay.
Last year’s M3GAN did a lot of this but with more sass and deeper subtext. Obviously, that film was more effective as it has a physically mobile villain instead of a mean speech synthesizer. It is therefore a little problematic gathering screams from a fancy looking Amazon Alexa. That’s probably why Afraid also comes with external elements of threat in the shape of wannabe Strangers possessing all sorts of digital head dresses and hiding at the edges of the storyline. However, the real purpose of their contribution, which comes a bit too late, is so implausibly stupid – it could have derailed the entire film. Incongruously, it is very Chris Weitz, who made low-brow films (American pie) as well as artistic ones (Twilight’s sequel) and moderate low-exhibitionism (Golden Compass), who turned out to be the one behind the video camera. He brings to the screen a shadiness that makes one feel depressed and one wishes to let out a frantic shout please Siri change the brightness and contrast.
What is highly troubling about AI is that there are a number of people who have high levels of misplaced confidence in this technology. It is probably not going to go = from the movie, which is going to get, sentient beings, who will take over the world. But it can take your job away, provide you with horrible health tips or make a self-driving car able to wander into a school zone. Since AIA in the hands of Afraid is principally directed toward making a god-like supermacihne which can controll kouros leqi Wi Fi, the technology cynosure illusion that AI is like a genie locked in the bottle only waiting to be unleashed and controlled is reinstated. Instead, it’s only as menacing as an Elon Musk tweet.
Final Judgment
From the last studio that made M3GAN, here is a much less fun but probably more useful horror film warning against the perils of advanced AI. In the roles of parents cheerfully connected to technology, John Cho and Katherine Waterston’s beta testing of a smart home assistant quickly goes into the realm of horror once the devices courses begin purchasing pets for the parents. In fact the stars are the only reason you’d want to turn on this absurd thriller with poor incoherent story line, where this piece of technology has come to be defender rather than its condemners.
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