AFRAID (2024) - Movie Review

[Music] [Applause] what is up guys and welcome to my review of afraid this is the newest horror Thriller release that has been quietly dropped into theaters that is I Believe co-produced by blumhouse so I got to be honest this is a movie that was not on my radar I had no idea that it was coming out I had no idea what it was about it just kind of got quietly released and I was looking to see what new releases were coming out this weekend and this was the only one that somewhat caught my eye and then when I looked up that it was a blumhouse movie I said oh it's all coming together I don't think that it's hyperbole to say that 2024 might be the year that absolutely decimates the reputation of blumhouse for a lot of horror fans now don't get me wrong they've always had kind of an up and down track record for every awesome hit that they release they have two or three stinkers that come out so they've always been a little shaky but the last year or more specifically within the calendar year of 2024 it's just been miss after Miss after miss and so I wasn't entirely surprised to find out that another one of these very lowbudget little Thriller horror films was released and barely even got a marketing campaign because they're probably just trying to recover the amount of money that they typically spend for these movies to just end up on the bottom five of the year list and ultimately what afraid is about is this new AI device that is created and it has been given to Jon Cho who is the protagonist of the film he brings it home as kind of like like a test run with his wife and his three kids and as you can probably predict things initially seem cool kids and the wife warm up to it very much and have this welcome presence of this new AI That's making their lives easier and as the movie goes on things get a little Sinister and they go hey you know when you were you know memorizing my Starbucks order and you were reading to my kids so that I can go [ __ ] my wife upstairs things were cool but now that you're getting people murdered for me I got to draw the line and so we have yet another movie that is trying to display the dangers of AI through a very run-of-the-mill horror Thriller situation is it as bad as I thought that it was going to be no it's not it's perfectly watchable but it was so frustrating how many genuinely interesting ideas and themes and discussion points were in this film that they just barely dabble into before the movie's runtime runs out like it's just absolutely unfocused and empty by the end of it but really quick before we dive into the good bad and ugly of afraid while an AI can make so so many aspects of our life better whether it be turning on technology or babysitting our kids one thing that an AI will never help you with is getting a good comfortable night's sleep so if you need help with that check out the sponsor of today's video mod linen our quality of sleep is one of the most important things for our health and happiness and 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link in the video description and use code Cody leech 35 for 35% % off of your purchase that's 35% off of your purchase by using the link in the video description and using discount code Cody leech 35 and thank you so much to mod linen for sponsoring today's video so starting off with the positives for afraid I genuinely think this movie has a lot of interesting ideas that it presents there are many different aspects to not only life but especially with kind of the Allure of AI and also inevitably the dangers of overutilization of AI that are very relatable and while we've had a ton of movies even recently that dive into this issue this is the most current of any of them so you have deep fakes in here you have people uh having a lot of different recordings taken of them and AI is able to recreate what they say and have false images and false audio of them that manipulates their life you have of course like uh self-propelled Teslas and things like that so while the idea is not fresh some of the utilization of that idea is fresh and Afraid and all throughout the movie there were multiple points where they start to dive into something with one of these kids or with the wife where I went oh okay that's an interesting thing to explore that's a good conversation to start and then as I will get into later on as soon as they start to get interesting with it they pretty much abandon the ideas altogether but I'll give credit for the fact that they have a lot of conversation starters in the movie unfortunately we're going to have to make up the meat of that conversation ourselves on the drive home cuz the movie doesn't do it for us but but there's something there Jon Cho is is very capable in this movie I've seen him do much better you know I don't want to give him too much credit for the movie cuz it doesn't require much out of him but he's an actor I've always felt had a lot of range of course he really got his start with comedies like the mil Guy and American Pie then eventually Harold and Kumar movies and since having things like uh searching and a few others like the Star Trek movies you start to see him stretch his legs a bit more and I wish I could see more of the guy you know this is far from a movie that I think displays his best work but I still like seeing him one thing about the movie and how it presents AI that I thought was refreshing is that it really doesn't try to go too heavy-handed with things in my opinion A lot of it is just kind of presenting scenarios and again presenting that Allure of AI why a lot of us know we probably shouldn't continue down this road but you're like damn it's really hard to resist some machine doing all this work for me and making my life a little bit easier and I think what it does a good job at is it kind of presents it as taking the very seemingly stressful sections out of your life and The Human Experience and really leaving life itself feeling empty by the end of it like very similar to the Adam Sandler film click which I think I'm probably the only person on YouTube who's going to compare these two but the big message of that movie that I've always felt is like all of those darker times like waiting for a promotion financial hardship having to punish your kids whatever it may be that is just as important to The Human Experience experience as the good times and when you try to just streamline everything and take away all the hardships of life you're really left with an empty experience and that's ultimately what AI is going to bring a lot of us is this empty experience of life whether it's trying to create art or it's trying to assist us in creating art there is this uncanny valley there that just feels artificial and I don't think it'll ever get to the point where we completely feel comfortable in what we're looking at what we're hearing or what we're experiencing so it doesn't go fullon into uh developing out the way that I just did I just did a lot of work for the movie in the last 2 minutes but uh it touches on that in a way that I thought was interesting and the final positive and it's sad that this has to be a positive but nowadays it absolutely is this is a very easy quick watch this is under 90 minutes it is a very digestible movie and while I certainly don't promote the idea of just making films and making stories that are just digestible that we could throw on in the background sometimes I don't mind that you know there's a lot of movies out there that are very taxing that are three-hour run times that you know especially ones that are bad that just feel like they go on an hour too long this one you could throw it on and have a decent enough time with it for 90 minutes and not feel like you have wasted all of your time of the day and not feel like you have really gotten ripped off for the money that you spent on it it's perfectly serviceable now moving on to the negatives first issue is that this movie really feels like it's missing a second act like you have all of the introduction of ya into the family and all the ways that ya starts to warm everybody's heart and like oh my God I really love what she does she reads to the kids and she helps me get back at bullies at school and she encourages me to go back to school I love ya and then within seconds it goes to third act [ __ ] where suddenly Jon Cho got a baseball bat trying to destroy supercomputers to Kill Ya and it just feels like there was a good 15 to 20 minutes of this film that was cut out which maybe is is great ful on their end maybe they had nothing really worthy of being there and so they just wanted it to be a quick experience like I just talked about but it really does feel like there was a transitional period in the story where ya starts to get more Sinister slowly over time that is entirely missing so it just goes from zero to a th000 within a couple of scenes I also found this entire family to be possibly the most devoid of chemistry family that I've seen in a major Studio film in a very long time and just each individual character the way that they talk the way that they interact with each other the way that their dialogue is written and performed I genuinely thought that there was going to eventually be some kind of a Twist or maybe like a pre-credits text rooll that was going to say the screenplay was actually written by AI haha see we're reinforcing the point even more with this because they just feel so unhuman so unnatural with the way that they interact with each other but spoiler alert that twist never came so it was literally just the way the movie was written and how it was per performed by the actors which I don't blame them they weren't given a whole lot to work with but there was so much about the way that this family interacted that just it almost it borderline annoyed me how unnatural they felt with each other I don't know if there's even any value anymore in saying that a new blumhouse film isn't scary but it's not scary whatsoever I actually feel like it's genuinely dishonest to Market this as a horror film I feel a little dirty just calling it a thriller cuz this is more of like a drama with a couple of mild tense scenes thrown in there the scenes that actually lean into horror sensibilities with a couple of jump scares or Shadows like they feel so foreign to the movie that they're in like you could damn near see the Staples holding those scenes into the real by some executive that said you know I don't know we're going to be able to Market this as a drama Thriller like horror fans tend to show up in droves no matter what the [ __ ] we advertise so I don't know throw in a couple of jump scares turn the lights off a few times and we'll just say it's a horror film and as a horror fan it just it kind of insults me you know it kind of feels like we're being like farmed for easy Turn and Burn cash and uh not cool with that not cool with that at all another issue with the film that irked me personally which might not be a big deal for a lot of people but I've had this happen a number of times with films over the last couple of years which is where they put so many things in the story that is so distinctly modern like things that have only become current within the last couple of years that I find it annoying like it just doesn't feel natural to me and it makes me hate all of the current trends of today whether they're displaying the self-driving cars or even just the nature of what AI can do nowadays and you have deep fake pranks going on at school and you have the younger kid that's addicted to his screen time and just begs every Fifth Line of the movie for more screen time there's even like very subtle commentary in here on like gentle parenting like every little thing that the movie gets into is so distinctly like 2023 2024 [ __ ] and with all of these modern things that they're exploring mixed with the very inhuman way that all of the characters interact with each other it just paints such an odd off-kilter Sheen onto everything that as somebody that thinks we've made a lot of good strides towards a society especially in modern times you look at it through the lens of this movie and you're like never mind [ __ ] it get rid of all of it it's not worth it take all this AI [ __ ] I want VHS tapes and vinyls I want cigars and Joe Camel I want red meat and political incorrectness bring it all back it's not [ __ ] worth it for comparison's sake if you disliked bodies bodies bodies and how modern that movie's dialogue and its ideas were this dips its toe into that not nearly as egregious as bodies bodies bodies but along that same path where I'm just like uh e no but the biggest issue of the movie is something that I've already kind of discussed it's that every single idea that it touches on most of which are very interesting in and of themselves they're just touched on they're just kind of thrown into the movie they're explored for about this amount of screen time and then we move move on to something else there's like five or six different versions of exploring the dangers of the modern world the dangers of modern technology addiction to screen time replacing genuine parenting with you know AI or YouTube babysitting or you know over Reliance on technology as an adult to sift through all of the hardships of adult life and parenting like so many different things where if they had just picked a couple of them you could have had a genuinely interesting Thriller here but because they just dabble into all of them it just feels like somebody came up with an idea for a decent little short film blumhouse got a hold of it said here's $12 million go make it 90 minutes long we'll throw it out in theaters double our profits and then move on to the next [ __ ] thing which sucks but that's just what I expect when I walk into a blumhouse film now interesting enough concept to put something on a poster and to throw a trailer together and you get to the movie and it's just empty and it's especially annoying with something like this where the dangers of AI and the potential horrible Futures that we have ahead of us that movies have been warning us about for well over 40 [ __ ] years that's something that's important that's something that a movie needs to take seriously that's something that a screenwriter and a director need to say hey we got something to say we need to make sure that we say it right because we want people to actually walk out of this and be thinking and not thinking about how low their Rotten Tomato score is going to be so when I see a subject like this get the low end of the blumhouse treatment where it's just turned into a concept that we can sell really quickly it's it's frustrating as [ __ ] to me like there's so much talent involved with these movies and it feels like we just get a glimmer of it and then it's just padded out all to hell because it's not given the budget or the development time or the care to actually turn it into something worthwhile it's just a turn andb burn movie mentality get it out get it out cheap get it out quick let's make our profit let's do five more so all in all guys this is probably the least egregious of any of Blum House's released this year so if you thought night swim and imaginary were okay you didn't have too bad of a time with it you might actually have a decent time with this one I think there is some interesting things going on here I just wish they actually committed to any single one of them to really have something to say it just feels kind of generic and empty by the end of it so you're not going to be mad you spent time with it but I certainly don't encourage you to spend your money and time with it well that's it for this one guys if you enjoyed that click over here for all of my 2024 new release reviews so far I'm also going to put a review up here for strange darling which is the one movie out this weekend that you absolutely should give your time money and attention to like share hit that subscribe button so you don't miss everything in the future and as always remember opinions are like [ __ ] but that doesn't mean you have to be