Afraid (2024)

John Cho was clearly a bit desperate to get off the starship "Enterprise" so took on the mantle of the dad "Curtis" in this predictable and derivative sci-fi yarn. He's happily married to "Meredith" (Katherine Waterston); they have three kids and he's in the advertising business. When his business is offered a fortune by an AI company to support their new at-home assistant "AIA", he finds his family are now the chief guinea pigs on the user-testing front. What now ensues sees the family's hitherto peaceable existence thrown into exaggerated turmoil by this gadget that ostensibly wants to help each of them out, but that does - of course - merely highlight plenty of the demons and issues that each is facing or has suppressed over the years. In some ways the plot does focus on the encroachment of technology in our lives and as "Curtis" himself asks, at what point will we ever be satisfied with the level of involvement it has in our existence before we call a halt to continued "enhancements", but those philosophical moments are few and far between as this short-ish drama follows an oft-travelled path that is short on scares and long on the been there, seen that. None of the acting is worth writing home about, nor is the screenplay and it's initially quite menacing premiss is swiftly reduced to something episodic that just makes me wonder how long we'll have to wait for "AfrAId II" or "Still AfrAId?". It's adequate TV fodder for the winter, but otherwise little better than an weakly adapted short story that fits perfectly into the mediocrity of the Blumhouse churn-factory.