When I watched Madame Web earlier this year, I was convinced I would not see a movie worse than that in 2024. This movie made me wish I was watching Madame Web. AfrAId, the latest Blumhouse horror flick, attempts to jump on the bandwagon of a hot societal topic. With AI being all the rage these days, it’s no wonder why this film was renamed from its original title, They Listen. The first trailer dropped less than two months before its release, and this movie did not have any hype leading up to it, leaving people devoid of any anticipation. Seeing it in a near-empty theater on opening weekend, the lack of excitement was evident.
AfrAId is so bad that I almost wish AI wrote it. Calling a script AI-generated is essentially a slur in Hollywood, but I’m convinced it could have been responsible. How meta would that be? A horror movie about AI written by AI. You could almost sell that based on the concept alone. But no, this movie is written and directed by Chris Weitz, whose career has seen the highs of About a Boy and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to the lows of The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Weitz has been consistently working within the studio system for decades, but everything about this movie screams amateur directorial debut.
At a breezy 84 minutes, I am convinced this movie has many scenes left on the cutting room floor. From the very beginning, many scenes feel like they end early. The pacing is unnatural, uneven, and off in a way that feels unintentional. Even the opening horror scene cuts off right before it can get scary. AfrAId features AI-generated art but never tries to pass any of it off as genuine. We know this is about AI, so the movie intentionally exploits the uncanny valley that AI creates to show off some disturbing imagery, a clear intention of the film that unfortunately falls short.
But this movie is never disturbing enough to be scary. The pacing is horrendous. Despite being a blessedly brief experience, it can still feel quite dull. Nothing horrifying happens in the story for the first 50-60 minutes of this 84-minute film. That’s why they shoehorn in a scary opening scene and a dream sequence so that you remember you’re supposed to be watching a horror movie. One idea involves an RV parked outside their house, but this idea never comes to a satisfying fruition.
If they wanted to do a slow burn that leads into horror, AfrAId should have at least been either entertaining or filled with human drama. But this film feels like it’s taking pieces from everything you’ve seen before. In 2013, Her was a romance movie between a man and a complex AI. In 2019, Jexi did a darkly comedic spin on this idea. Now, in 2024, we get the horror version of humanity’s relationship with a complex AI. But we didn’t need this. We already saw Blumhouse pull out this concept with an exceptional 2023 movie named M3GAN. This film follows that same concept without the fun, creepy doll or any of the hilarious humor.
What exactly does AfrAId contribute to the cinematic landscape we haven’t already gotten in a much superior capacity? Nothing. The dialogue scenes can feel stilted, unnatural, and poorly paced. It’s disposable horror at its worst, where it doesn’t know how to have fun with the premise and takes itself far too seriously. I also don’t understand why Curtis was the main character. Cho is a talented actor, but this is the most one-dimensional protagonist I’ve seen in a film all year.
Every member of this family is an archetype. Minus the dad, who is an exceptionally dull character, we have the mom who wants to revive her doctoral thesis (who cares), a teen girl getting pressured by her a-hole boyfriend (typical), a tween boy getting bullied by his peers who he wants to be friends with (sound familiar?), and a younger child who’s just…a young child. This is a vastly uninteresting set of characters. You don’t like or care about a single one of them. AfrAId is personality-free horror, as if any Joe Schmoe could have directed it.
Every subplot is the worst possible version of it. We don’t care about Curtis and his job. We don’t care about Meredith (Katherine Waterston) and her unfulfilled life as a mom. We don’t care about their two young sons. The one almost interesting subplot is one where Iris (Lukita Maxwell) gets deepfaked into a pornographic video by her boyfriend, and it spreads around the school. It takes too long to see how people treat her differently once this video is leaked. Once we do see how people treat her, the results are hysterical. It’s so melodramatic that I started laughing at it.
There’s one more attempt at an emotional hook. This one surrounds Meredith and her dead father. This subplot was so poorly handled I wanted to run to the front of the theater and punch a hole into the screen. There’s a scene near the end where we’re supposed to feel for Meredith as she confronts the memory of her father. The problem is that her father had never been mentioned before this scene. We didn’t even know he was dead until this “emotional” scene. We have no idea what their relationship was like when he was alive. You only get to tug on our heartstrings if you do the proper setup beforehand. This scene is a disgrace. It meant nothing. It is nothing.
We have yet to get to this final act. AfrAId was terrible enough for the first hour, but once we got to the last twenty minutes, I needed to fight every impulse in my body not to leave. A couple showed up to the screening and left half an hour into the movie, never to return. Oh, how I envied them. These last twenty minutes accomplished something that few other movies have done: it made me hate my life with each passing second. It is the most random, cobbled-together excuse of a third act I’ve ever seen.
I’m still going. I can do better. It feels like someone took five different drafts of the movie made by five different writers, carelessly dropped them on the floor, picked them all up, and then filmed them in that order. With every new twist, the movie makes less and less sense. Ideas are introduced and abandoned instantly. I wanted to burst out laughing. “Jaw-dropping” is a common adjective for film, but I assure you, my jaw actually dropped during this final act in the worst possible way. Everything is so out of left field it feels frustrating.
No, you know what? I’m still not done. It feels like they asked a group of 11-year-olds what they thought would be a good ending for a horror movie and then mashed up every one of their ideas. Movies like AfrAId are so irredeemably awful that they can make one forget how good horror movies can be. The ending is trying to say something meaningful, but the execution made me want to pull my hair out. It’s the worst movie of the year. As the film got worse and worse, all I wanted to do was throw my hands in the air and quit. But I didn’t. So now you’re reading this review. You’re welcome.
SCORE: 1/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 1 equates to “Awful.”
ComingSoon doesn’t enjoy giving out an awful rating, and it’s generally reserved for video games that are broken or entertainment that is devoid of any redeeming qualities.
