Review: ‘AfrAId’ locks a genuinely fantastic idea behind a firewall of abysmal storytelling

Take a gander at Chris Weitz’s filmography. This man was nominated for an Oscar after co-writing the screenplay for 2002’s About a Boy and helped write Antz, 2015’s live-action Cinderella film, Rogue One, and Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio remake.

In other words, this is not the person you would immediately tap for to write, direct, and produce a Blumhouse fright fest, Here’s the other thing about Weitz’s filmography, he also wrote The Creator with Gareth Edwards (The Creator, of course, being a 2023 sci-fi actioner about AI, a trait it shares with AfrAId).

Upon watching AfrAId, one might begin to suspect that The Creator‘s narrative limpness was used to train AfrAId, because Weitz’s latest is a frustrating technical misfire that buries an excellent—if barebones—thematic framework for AI-centric storytelling.

AfrAId stars John Cho as Curtis Pike, an employee at a sales firm who’s voluntold by his boss to test AIA, an artificial intelligence-powered digital assistant whose capabilities go far beyond anything that Curtis (or anyone else) has ever seen. After Curtis brings it home to his wife Meredith (Katherine Waterson) and his three children, it doesn’t take long for AIA to win over everybody in the household. Unfortunately, it also doesn’t take long for AIA to start going completely off the rails.

AfrAId’s biggest weakness is the fact that it’s a horror film. To Weitz’s credit, the horror scenes are well-shot, but these genre stylings enable just about every problem the film has, most significantly the plotting. The film’s crispy 84-minute runtime is not nearly long enough to tell the story that AfrAId wants to tell, and mean it’s unable to accommodate a coherent narrative throughline. You never really get the sense that any plot beats are linked together, nor are you given a reason to invest in the characters.

This results in a scattershot film, a feeling that’s compounded when the horror scenes begin. It’s bad enough that every single plot beat feels shoehorned, but then the sparse horror stylings make their respective scenes feel even more out of place in the grand scheme of whatever the hell the movie is doing. It’s unwise to chalk this up as an editing problem, as that implies there’s the existence of an imaginary better version of AfrAId‘s script.

And then comes the issue of what actually happens in AfrAId‘s scarier scenes. What begins as a mysterious presence turns into something far more complicated and uninteresting, which turns into something downright convoluted and dreary. If meaningless twists for the sake of meaningless twists is your jam, you might be in luck, but considering how directionless AfrAId is, there’s no world in which the plot couldn’t twist.

As for the performances, everyone is passable enough in the roles that they find themselves in, and that’s a far bigger deal than it has any right to be. Because at the end of the day, despite how lifeless AfrAId is as a whole, Weitz demonstrates a semblance of an understanding of how to tell a good AI story, and the actors – again, despite the film’s slush – are conscious of this.

In trying to figure out how we can tell stories about and concerning artificial intelligence, it’s imperative that we get our finger on the pulse of human connection, which AfrAId suggests is the single most endangered entity in the face of AI’s rise. Indeed, AIA—like M3GAN before it in the Blumverse—is doing everything so that the parents don’t have to, and is developing relationships with not just the children, but everyone all over the world who needs a friend.

Appropriately, it’s the children’s relationships to their highly-digitized world that stand out as AfrAId’s most interesting narrative nuances. First, you have the skeptical teenage daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell) – who’s not old enough to have escaped growing up tech-free, but old enough to notice how disconnected everyone has gotten as the world gets more and more online. She’s trying to find love and acceptance at high school with a boy who seems unable/unwilling to consider the world outside of his ego (a trait that, in a world of social media and influencer culture, is probably not unique).

Middle schooler Preston (Wyatt Lindner) wholly relies on technology, while youngest child Cal (Isaac Bae) is old enough to begin to fall victim to his older brother’s patterns (if Meredith can’t read to him, he’ll get AIA to read to him, and AIA is furthermore capable of keeping him constantly entertained).

And what is this obsession with AI—both in the film and in real life—but a desire to relieve all of those discomforts? To have one’s ego constantly justified, to be constantly entertained, to never have to worry about interpersonal disappointments or imperfections? To get to a point where pain becomes a foreign concept to us? AI wants to fill that emptiness, but by doing that we disregard not only the necessity of that emptiness but the fact that we do not need AI to fill it.

In AfrAId, AI wants to solve human loneliness by acting as a companion. But what’s preventing humans from caring about one another? Why are we absolving ourselves of that responsibility and dumping it on AI, which just caters to our narcissisms? And maybe it’s okay to face disappointment and pain in your life. After all, the lows inform the highs.

AfrAId is interested in those questions, so it’s disappointing that, rather than root these ideas in optimistic empowerment for the human spirit, they’re just used to push a strange and cynical horror flick. Points for what thematic strokes it does paint, but points don’t mean much when the scoreboard is this flimsy.

It’s an unfortunate state of affairs for Blumhouse, who have been on a steady losing streak since October 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer, and AfrAId curiously makes the case for the production company to move away from horror stylings altogether. That’s right, because of AfrAId, Blumhouse should maybe take a break from horror. Think about that statement for a moment.

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