Parents' Guide to AfrAId

AI is a hot topic for horror, and there's plenty that could be done with it, but despite good characters and a promising setup, this film goes haywire with its silly, one-note third act. Writer-director Chris Weitz, whose previous experience with horror extends no further than The Twilight Saga: New Moon, starts AfrAId off poorly, with a prologue and a jump scare, before getting to his strong suit: the characters. The struggles of the Pike family are real, including trying to get the kids off to school and dealing with sick children, screen time, feet on the table, etc. Mom Meredith is especially relatable, caught between parenthood and wanting to finish her scholarly work on ants. (The parallel between insect eyes and AIA's camera eyes is sadly never explored.)

Indeed, it's hard not to get excited by AIA and the quick, clever solutions it offers. But when AIA begins to turn, it feels too easy, guided more by humans' irrational fears than by what might actually be scientifically plausible. It's almost as if Weitz suddenly remembered he was making a horror movie and needed to throw creepy figures and silly nightmare sequences in to scare people. AIA becomes a one-dimensional villain that cackles and discusses its evil plan without any consideration of what made it that way. The movie is cheerfully advertised as "from the producer of M3GAN," which is a thematically similar movie about an artificial intelligence tangling with humans, but one that does so with much more wit and emotional depth. AfrAId falls far short by comparison, almost as if it was running out of battery power before it could even get anywhere.