On the one hand, Afraid is just another smart home automation AI paranoia film that borrows a little too much from Her and Megan. On the other hand, I kind of liked how it ended even if getting there was pretty rough.

The film stars John Cho as a husband and father who brings home an advanced AI home appliance that puts Siri and Alexa to shame. She’s super helpful to the entire family, sometimes in disturbing ways. Plus there are creepers hanging out in an RV across the street.

This film knows all the tech buzzwords and chucks ’em out there with abandon. But it doesn’t know how to actually fill the script with interesting or smart content. Plus it randomly decides to be a horror movie probably because a producer freaked out there wasn’t enough of that Megan action. Also, the characters do and say things that aren’t backed by anything they actually know.

It’s kind of annoying seeing the hooks for a better movie but having the most of the script be so dumb and cliched. It chucks ideas at the wall without doing anything with them (like name-dropping Greek myths like Prometheus or Pandora). Or what looked like demonic imagery to me that made me wonder if we were in a very different movie (spoiler alert: we weren’t).

And yet… I really liked how it ended. There’s a certain random chaos and dread with how the events unfolds. It’s an interesting finale that suggests the horror wasn’t the simple stuff we’d seen, but actually a wider, off-screen escalation. I was left wondering where the story would go once the credit rolled… which is kinda rare for me.

Because I liked some of its ideas and gritted my teeth through some of its dumb, I was willing to go with an “ok-ish” score. But since I liked the ambiguity of its creepy ending, I’m raising that to a “pretty ok”. Plus its always fun seeing John Cho frown at computers.

Score: 75