AFRAID

Often the best horror films are the ones that you hope don’t turn into horror films. The ones where you enjoy spending time with the protagonists; where you don’t want anything bad to happen to them. Because to truly make the horrific events that follow impactful, you need to care about those being impacted.

So, as someone who isn’t a huge fan of horror films, you can imagine my pleasure when, for the most part, this one didn’t. Turn into a horror film that is. 

It has a few atmospheric moments, it glances occasionally towards a jump scare - albeit without ever fully committing to it - and it does use shadow and movement effectively as mediums with which to scare, but for the most part it gets too bogged down with its various plot mechanics to give enough time to that which might make it actually scary.

And the plot is muddled, and there is a huge amount going on. The A plot - if you can call it that - centres around John Cho’s Curtis, a marketing executive who agrees to live with a revolutionary new AI - AIA (voiced by Havana Rose Liu) - in order to test its functionality. AIA, naturally is incredibly advanced and incredibly helpful, but as it becomes more and more entwined in the families lives they begin to suspect that all is not as it seems.

Away from this however we have Curtis’ wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston) a researcher looking to get back into his work, his daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell), who gets embroiled in a deep fake porn scandal, his sons Preston and Cal (Wyatt Lindner and Isaac Bae respectively) and their own problems with school and health, a shady tech company and a missing child.

And I’m probably forgetting something.

This is a lot to get through, whilst also attempting to be scary, and Afraids (stylised as AfrAId) tight 84 minute runtime doesn’t allow for any of this to develop in a satisfying way.

And don’t get me wrong, I actually quite enjoyed some of it. I enjoyed spending time with the family, and I thought the look of the film was excellent, it just never adds up to the sum of it’s parts.

Which is a shame because there is good in here.

Ultimately though, it is a film of B plots that never quite come together. A film of interesting ideas that are never given the space to breathe, or investigated as thoroughly as they could be.

I wouldn’t necessarily be against revisiting this universe at some point with a sequel, there are many directions and more interesting stories to tell within it, but I fear there will never be the opportunity.

Because for the films producers, the only thing to be afraid of, is its underwhelming box office numbers.