Starring John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, Ashley Romans, Greg Hill, Riki Lindhome, David Dastmalchian, and Keith Carradine.

Written and Directed by Chris Weitz

Sony

When a young family trials AIA, the next generation in digital home assistant, the AI’s endeavours to meet their every need start to get out of control.

London buses, eh? You wait ages and then three come along at once. It’s like AI movies…

…except it isn’t.

If we had as many buses as we have films about rogue Artificial Intelligence, no one would ever need to buy a car again. I’m supposed to be frightened by their potential for malevolence, whereas in real life I’m more worried that in order to prove I’m not a robot I have to spend my life deciding whether the corner of a handlebar counts as a motorbike.

So, sitting down to watch Chris Weitz’s new AI thriller, AFRAID – which undoubtedly treads a lot of very familiar territory – the question is whether there’s a single thing left to say on this well-worn subject.

It turns out that there is. Writer/Director Chris Weitz has a patchy CV – everything from the excellent screen adaptation of About A Boy to Disney’s woeful live action reboot of Pinocchio with scripts for Rogue One and The Creator along the way. It’s a hit and miss list, but he’s always smart. What distinguishes AFRAID from similar AI yarns such as M3gan and the awful Subservience (reviewed just a few days ago here) is that while Weitz frames the story along conventional AI thriller lines, he’s much more interested in humankind’s compliance and indeed yearning for what Artificial Intelligence can do for us. If AI is going to destroy us, it will be because we wanted it to.

John Cho and Katherine Waterston do a great job as hand-wringing liberal parents Curtis and Meredith, more than happy to offload the responsibilities of parenthood onto AIA’s tireless semi-conductors. There is real moral ambivalence as AIA intervenes when their teenage daughter becomes a victim of digitally manipulated sexting. And in a conclusion reminiscent of David Ambrose’s excellent AI novel Mother of God Weitz attempts to explore the notion of social media and the World Wide Web as a form of collective shadow intelligence which is destined to skew to humanity’s darker instincts.

For students of the genre this is all highly nutritional. Where the movie falters is in its execution. For reasons hard to pin down, it never quite escapes its straight-to-DVD, B-movie patina. There seem to be all sorts of sub-plots – perhaps the remnants of earlier drafts – fighting for space, none of which are resolved satisfactorily. Because Weitz – to his credit – is interested in the subject’s nuances and grey areas, it’s never really clear whose side we’re supposed to be on. So, as a thriller, it doesn’t really thrill at all, and I was left feeling that he would have been better writing a more carefully plotted social satire.

Verdict: AFRAID is no classic, falling far short as the thriller it is supposed to be, but if you’re interested in AI, and a more thoughtful dramatic insight to the subject, it’s well worth 84 minutes of your time when it hits a streaming platform near you very soon. 6/10

Martin Jameson

http://www.ninjamarmoset.com