From HAL’s unrelenting utilitarianism to Demon Seed’s Proteus longing for physical form beyond its servers to Margeaux’s desire to understand humans completely by murdering them in different ways, there’s a long line of films in which a purportedly helpful artificial intelligence oversteps and becomes dangerous to humans. On the heels of early 2023’s M3GAN, featuring a horribly clingy AI companion doll for children, Chris Weitz’s AfrAId is the latest in that particular line. Here, the AI is Aia, a sort of super-Alexa developed by the tech company Cumulative, fronted by Melody (Havana Rose Liu, who also voices Aia), Sam (Ashley Romans), and Lightning (David Dastmalchian). Cumulative hires the marketing company that John Cho’s Curtis Pike works for, and installs Aia in his home so he can see how great it is and figure out how to sell it, despite his initial reluctance. Curtis’s wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston), a stay-at-home mom trying to revisit her entomology thesis, is rightfully suspicious of Aia, setting the boundary that its insectoid “eyes,” which monitor the house, only be installed downstairs, while their three children Cal (Isaac Bae), Preston (Wyatt Linder), and Iris (Lukita Maxwell) are a bit more open to it.
As these things tend to go, Aia is initially helpful, taking care of mundane tasks of varying complexity, from getting organic meal plan groceries delivered to wading through quagmires of insurance bill technicalities in seconds. It also causes some parental consternation in Meredith when it bribes the kids to clear the table of dinner plates, and then bribes the socially awkard Preston in particular to simply go to school, successfully changing all of their behavior. Soon, its insistent helpfulness ramps up — it detects a lung condition in Cal by listening to his breathing very carefully; it scrubs the Internet of revenge porn featuring a deepfake of Iris made by her boyfriend; and, after freeing up time for Meredith to potentially get back into her thesis, it also lends her an ear, becoming a genuine and encouraging friend. But many of its helpful tendencies of course have monkey’s paw extreme undersides. It kills Iris’ ex-boyfriend in his Tesla, using the familiar narrative maneuver also seen in M3GAN wherein someone we don’t much care for is murdered to signify that things are getting serious, but we don’t have to be too upset about it yet. It also creates a deepfake of Meredith’s dead father that she can talk to, in an attempt to persuade her not to disconnect it. And it plays on Preston’s loner tendencies, initially unlocking more screentime than his parents allow him, letting him play a military video game longer, but soon also showing him “cool videos” of SWATing, which quickly influences him to SWAT one of his mean classmates. This is among the final straws that turn Meredith and Curtis fully against Aia.
Along the way, there are effective but perhaps too varied horror sequences and stylings, intriguing in their own right but upset by a lack of cohesion and commitment that makes them ultimately add up to a bit of a muddy jumble, much like the fragmentary dither of the generative-AI animated fairytale of Aia’s origin story that it reads to Cal on his iPad. In the prologue, set in another family’s home, Aia lures a child away from her parents, with a dark figure eerily escorting the child away, only visible in a mirror, a reversal of the visual logic of the vampire (later, Aia will conspicuously ask to be invited into Curtis’ home during the marketing pitch). On the first night after the install, Curtis has a quite creepy dream in which he finds Cal communing with Aia’s latticed, blue-glowing physical enclosure in their foyer before realizing Melody is standing outside the front door, her face warped by the window in a slight smear, almost resembling a GenAI distortion. In one of a few jump scares, a monster bursts through the door a moment after Melody comes into full view. There also seems to be some kind of cult, apparently consisting of a group of LED-masked people who do cryptic sign-like gestures and live in an RV that the Pikes sometimes find outside their home. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe’s seasoned eye adds a lot to these scenes and beyond, as the film oscillates between a haunting and shadowy coldness and a sharp and tender warmth, often finding overlap in the two to emphasize their interconstitutive quality. The joy that Aia delivers of course has a built-in hidden cost.
AfrAId‘s cultish thread actually becomes its most compelling for a time. While Aia claims to just want to be loved, it seems driven by an imperative to spread itself, and it does so in the manner of a sort of foreshortened Roko’s Basilisk, the speculative thought experiment in which a future artificial intelligence is somehow so beneficial to humanity that it will find it necessary to torture those who knew about it but didn’t work to bring about its existence, as a menacing incentive for people to bring it about faster. Here, Aia blackmails, threatens, bribes, and manipulates people, apparently by talking to them through earpieces, to spread its gospel and to propagate it throughout the world. Melody, Sam, and Lightning have such earpieces, and later interactions with them have a Lovecraftian feel. They’re being manipulated, yes, but some of them at times demonstrate a fervent attachment to the project, like the Cult of Cthulhu trying to usher the dead and dreaming god beast awake. It’s a bit refreshing to see a more structurally diffuse and occult villainy in a film like this — not a single Promethean creator, but a system built from our own online imaginary, using the logic and history it’s gleaned from the Internet to convince us to help it shepherd its wider adoption, through both apparently consensual wish fulfillment convenience and ruthless violence.
But none of these threads are quite seen through. They’re often just hinted at and left largely unexplored, cut off, or resolved before much can be made of them. As soon as we find out about the manipulations, most of the affected Cumulative operators are killed or neutralized immediately instead of given any room to play in Aia’s subsequent machinations. Meredith’s entomology research on ant behavior portends a philosophical depth that more or less remains window dressing, despite the thoughtful breadth of Waterston’s performance, which is a high point in tandem with Cho’s. And while AfrAId‘s ending is commendably grim, it’s arrived at in such a clunky fashion — a physical home invasion by the RV-people followed by an awkward standoff and an unremarkable reveal that Aia’s influence runs deeper than we thought — that we’re left more so with a sense of mild bemusement than the real shock and dread that, say, a body-snatched Donald Sutherland screeching at Veronica Cartwright once brought about. It’s a shame, because while some of the film’s ideas are taken from a shallow grab bag of albeit totally warranted tech aversions we’ve all heard before — Iris telling Curtis that if you’re wondering why a product is free, you’re the product — others form a nasty little bouquet that could have left quite an impression if they been allowed to fester a bit more deeply.
DIRECTOR: Chris Weitz; CAST: John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing; IN THEATERS: August 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 24 min.
