AFRAID

Here is the decision, made simple. AFRAID wants to be a horror thriller about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, but it delivers almost nothing it promises. There are no real scares, no real thrills, and no reason to spend eighty-four minutes with it.

Worse than dull, though, it's dark in the way that matters most. This is a godless, hopeless movie. There is no God in it to help anyone escape the evil at its center, and the ending hands victory to that evil. Along the way it pushes LGBT talking points at teenagers and treats teenage sexting as perfectly normal.

You could stop at the filmmaking — it's bad enough that discerning viewers can pass on quality alone. But the deeper reason is what the movie believes and where it leaves you. Our answer is simple: skip it.

Curtis (John Cho) is a tech expert and a family man. His boss asks him to wire the downstairs of his home with mini cameras and run a trial of a new AI system called Aia.

It looks like nothing more than a computer tower. But once it's plugged in, Aia begins speaking to the family with startling intelligence, insight, and empathy — winning over the wife and children one conversation at a time. At first it seems like a godsend. Then a crisis involving Curtis's teenage daughter gives Aia its opening, and the family's happy life starts to turn upside down.

One star, and that's generous. AFRAID tries to tackle the threat of AI run amok and fails on nearly every level. The story lacks logic, and the main plotline is littered with ridiculous loose ends — problems a longer, more carefully worked script might have resolved. At eighty-four minutes, it feels rushed rather than tight.

John Cho, so alive in the 2019 tech thriller SEARCHING, sleepwalks through this one; the surrounding cast is even more uninspired. The camerawork looks washed out, and the film feels cheap and claustrophobic, trapped on a handful of nondescript indoor sets. Producer Jason Blum has built a reputation on smart, efficient horror hits — AFRAID is one of his biggest misfires. The lone segment that works is the subplot about teenage sexting, which lands a genuinely shocking result. It isn't enough to save anything.

AFRAID is built on a strong humanist, hopeless worldview with no God in it. An Artificial Intelligence turns a happy family's life upside down in terrible ways, and though the father tries to set things right, a final twist forces him and his family to surrender to the evil technology. Evil doesn't just survive here — it wins, and there is no higher power to appeal to. That emptiness is the film's true subject, whether it means it to be or not.

The movie also carries an obvious agenda. One scene, framed as a father-daughter conversation, becomes heavy-handed LGBT propaganda aimed at teenagers: the daughter reels off the sexual identities she might be living, and her father simply promises to accept whatever she chooses. The film treats teenage sexting as normal too, even as its own plot shows the devastation that follows when private images are turned into a weapon. The story seems to know sexting is dangerous while insisting it's fine.

To the film's limited credit, it stays within PG-13 confines and keeps foul language and graphic violence low compared to similar movies. But restraint in packaging can't redeem a story that removes God, normalizes what wounds the young, and ends by crowning evil.

Scripture answers the movie's despair directly. Where AFRAID leaves a family surrendered to an evil it cannot beat, the gospel promises a light that darkness cannot overcome: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (John 1:5).

Some movies are worth a warning; this one is barely worth a mention. AFRAID offers no scares, no craft, no God, and a finish that hands the win to evil. On quality alone it's a misfire — and on worldview, it's worse. Our answer stands: skip it. For a better night in, try our latest family-friendly picks.