Review: The strained thriller 'Afraid,' about a family terrorized by A.I., is more artificial than intelligent

The suspense thriller “Afraid” is a slickly produced but dimly conceived mishmash of every dime-store tech analyst’s worry about artificial intelligence, tied together with an idiotic home invasion narrative.

Curtis and Meredith Pike (John Cho and Katherine Waterston) would seem to have an enviable upper-middle-class California life. Curtis works for a high-paying marketing firm, where he can spin pitches about how they don’t sell products but tell stories. Meredith is stay-at-home mom to their three kids — teen Iris (Lukita Maxwell), 10-year-old Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and first-grader Cal (Isaac Bae) — who’s just restarting her work to get her Ph.D. as an insect biologist.

They would seem to be the last family to need the help of a hyper-intelligent A.I. system, called Aia, that his boss, Marcus (Keith Carradine), wants to attract as a marketing client. Curtis meets Aia’s human developers, Lightning (David Dastmalchian) and Sam (Ashley Romans), and agrees to have Aia installed in the family home for a test run.

At first, Aia — voiced by Havana Rose Liu, who also plays Lightning and Sam’s assistant, Melody — seems like a benign household helper. It encourages Cal and Preston to do their chores, offers Iris an assist on her college application essay, and orders organic foods for Meredith to ready-pack for the kids’ lunches. 

But Curtis starts to suspect some more sinister at work, in part because Sam and Lightning are just a little off. (Note to casting directors: Dastmalchian — after his work in “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” “The Boogeyman” and “Late Night With the Devil” — is a little on-the-nose if you’re trying to signal eerie menace in your movie.)

Every story scared parents know about their kids and technology — from a concern about too much screen time to fears of their daughters being edited into deepfake porn — gets turned into a clever plot point, as Aia’s fierce protectiveness toward the children turns aggressive and even murderous.

If writer-director Chris Weitz (“The Golden Compass,” “The Twilight Saga: New Moon”) had kept this good-looking but shallow thriller in that groove, he might have had something. But when the script tries to tell Aia’s origin story, the movie goes off the rails. I won’t try to explain the backstory, partly to avoid spoilers but mostly because it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Cho and Waterston, both strong actors, do their best through the movie’s choppy pacing — which makes one suspect that half the movie got left behind in the edit. Waterston is particularly good in an isolated moment when Aia tries to manipulate her emotions. 

But there’s not much to be done with a movie like “Afraid,” that sets up its technological boogeyman in such a hermetically sealed way that genuine terror — or any other non-algorithmic emotion — can’t penetrate. Better to log off and touch grass.

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‘Afraid’

★★

Opens Friday, August 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual material, some strong violence, some strong language, and thematic material. Running time: 83 minutes.