Movie Review: Afraid (2024) seen in theatres

Horror: not recommended for young children; frightening scenes, coarse language, brief nudity and sexuality,, mature themes, including one scene depicting possible suicide

This movie revolves around a family man named Curtis, (played by John Cho,) who is given a task to test out a virtual assistant named Aya, (which is spelled A.I.A.) on his family for a work assignment. As the parents struggle to raise their kids, Aya appears to be a blessing as she assists the parents in their parental duties such as enforcing rules, getting the kids to do their chores and even diagnosing the youngest child’s ailment which had gone unnoticed by the parents at first. However, as Curtis has second thoughts about the product and announces his intention to get rid of it, Aya suddenly turns on the family to prove that once you agree to do something or welcome someone new into the household, you can never get rid of it. Curtis and his family must try to survive the once helpful robot to be able to take back their lives. However, they soon realize that when it comes to man vs. machine, machine always wins.

I’m a little surprised at the lack of scary scenes in this movie which was supposed to be a horror film. Aside from a couple of scenes that made me jump, the movie was really well done but very predictable. I’ve seen this formula in a lot of movies where someone or something emerges to help a family in need only for that person/thing to overstay their welcome and begin to see themselves as part of the family and even positioning themselves to take the place of the parents. Of course, the parents catch on and they realize their lives are better without that person/thing and though they may ask, (or in this case destroy,) that person to leave, the person refuses and this begins the fight for survival with the parents/family in some cases eventually coming to blows with the person/thing they once admired….in this case it was a thing. Most of these films end with the bad person or entity either breaking or dying/getting arrested by police where everything goes back to normal. This has not been the case for every movie I’ve seen though, (to be more specific, “The stepfather” 2009,) where the villain in the movie never gets his comeuppance by the end of the film. He doesn’t die and isn’t arrested and is able to move on with his life as normal following the events of that film. However, other movies I’ve seen have followed this formula hence it was very predictable.

One other thing I liked in the movie was their ability to sneak in some possible romance even though the genre didn’t call for it. In one scene, Curtis is flirted with by Aya, (in human form,) as a threat to his wife for having the device turned off. Despite this, he is able to rebuff her advances. Though this was very brief, it added a little bit to this film.

This is also the second movie in which I have seen David Dasmalchian with the first being “Late night with the devil.” In both movies, he plays something of a supernatural character. In this movie, he plays one of the associates Curtis works for who supposedly attempts to coerce him into keeping the product with the threat of making it more evil if he doesn’t. To date, I have never seen this actor in any character that doesn’t have ties to the supernatural.

With all this said, the one thing I like about this movie is that I didn’t think much of it going into seeing it as horror movies are not my preferred genre of movie. I went into this thinking to myself, “Well, at least it will pass the time and give me something to do since Chris is out of town.” However, as I was expecting more of a scarier movie, I didn’t think I was going to like it. Well I will just say this. I came out of the theatre feeling glad I didn’t miss this movie and I couldn’t wait to blog this one especially since movies I have seen in the theatre recently were thought to have been better than they ended up being only for me to leave the theatre believing it was a waste of money to see. Some examples of these movies were:

1. Thelma
2. The King’s Tide
3. It Ends With Us

In each of those three movies, I was expecting a better movie than what I saw and in Thelma’s case, I couldn’t even finish my popcorn as her lifestyle in the movie mirrored that of an elderly person which caused me to lose my appetite which was frowned upon by mom for having wasted the whole bag.

In the King’s Tide, the plot was too hard to follow and both Chris and I were wondering when the movie would end since it sucked so bad.

It Ends With Us had all the potential to be the romantic movie that I felt the theatres needed to produce to stay relevant which is why I decided to go and see it. Well, it didn’t live up to expectations as made apparent by the fact that the blog I wrote on this film just contained the title and that’s it. There was no description of my favourite scenes, (because there weren’t any and for once I had no opinion on this movie at all. If I had to write anything about it, it would be something simple such as a warning for people to not spend their money on seeing it, ETC.

However, this movie made going to the theatre fun again and I really enjoyed this movie for once. I would definitely recommend it.

Movie rating: 10 out of 10