AfrAId (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

"Seriously? A horror movie about AI right now? What, an evil Alexa takes over a stupid family's smart house?" There are a lot of reasons not to see this movie. Blumhouse, for its many successes, has lots of titles that leave people -- including me -- wanting. And horror films about super-timely cultural hot topics are so rarely insightful, incisive, or incendiary; remember the assembly line of horror/thrillers about viral trends and violent virtual games a decade ago? Hell, I don't even personally like most movies oriented toward teens or young adults that have to do with dolls and robots. M3gan, sorry, just wasn't for me.

But AfrAId, with its obnoxious title stylization and premise directly from any number of horror television episodes (I'm certain X-Files and Evil and American Horror Story aren't the only series that have featured AI as a portal of domestic horror), isn't doing the same shlocky work as so many before it. At least, not entirely.

A magnificent John Cho plays Curtis, a marketing expert, is assigned to a new up-and-coming client, a virtual assistant device to beat all the others. It's called AIA (pronounced "Ah-yah"), and its sleek design and soothing voice (Havana Rose Liu) are meant to become helpful companions for customers, anticipating their needs and bringing intelligent order to domestic life. Curtis is apprehensive -- not only because a creepy David Dastmalchian is one of the company's reps -- but allows AIA to be set up in his home on a trial run. Obviously, things are going to go bad.

But AfrAId isn't really about that. Sure, its second half devolves into a predictably paced plot with a couple jump scares as the family fights AIA's influence and control, but anyone heading into this film expecting a normal horror film -- hell, even a scary movie -- is going to be disappointed.

I found the film quite refreshing simply because it doesn't really fit that bill. It's much more effective as a family drama. Its entire first half is essentially that: Curtis, enamored by the amount of money at stake, wants to provide for his troubled family. His housewife Meredith (the always reliable Katherine Waterston) was an entomologist who still wants to finish her thesis but can't because of the needs of her household; she's not bitter, but she's not happy in their apparently too-familiar, too-tired marriage. At one point, she says, "I was somebody before I became just a mom," and it was a gut-punch. Their eldest, teen daughter Iris, is glued to her smart phone and doing things she should not be doing with an irresponsible, disrespectful boy at school. Their middle son Preston is anxious to a lonely fault and desperate for friends, while their youngest son Cal is precocious and sweet but has a secret medical condition. The first half of the film features some really great acting and nuanced handling of these characters, setting up emotional connections between them and with us that few horror films ever try to cultivate.

The writing isn't always as subtle as the performances or direction, but director Chris Weitz knows when to offer some loomings -- some suggestion of unease, of uncanny influence -- to keep things moving rather than wallowing. No scene outstays itself, but we're also in no hurry to proceed. He lulls us into a comfortable plodding pace that simultaneously encourages us to think about the implications of each new revelation: the ways in which the family truly needs outside help and what will happen when they get it become calculated, premediated steps on an inevitable path.

Unfortunately, there are elements that don't work as well for me, especially the motor home parked across the street and the shadowy figures stalking the family in digital face masks. But these elements are brief and mostly inconsequential; a simple workshop should have eliminated these subplots and streamlined the domestic drama. In the same vein, the film's couple attempts at jump scares didn't work for me; it should have relied on its capably chilling sense of dread and the emotional disturbances at the heart of its central conflicts, namely when AIA and each member of the family have their "seduction" and "conflict" moments. It's the strongest element, thematically, anyway. Early on, Curtis says that families -- including his own -- are terrifying because it's like having additional body parts, but you can't control them. Wow.

Weitz does utilize a few clever and effective elements, especially the shifting, morphing face of AIA through artificially generated people in advertisement-like scenes of it talking to us. Additionally, the ending -- potential spoiler, but y'all, it's bleak -- had my jaw drop right to the floor of my otherwise empty auditorium. It might not be worth the inflated price of a theater ticket these days, that's up to you to decide, but I'm really glad to have seen it and look forward to a rewatch once it's streaming. Simple and effective, this movie operates on its own wavelength and tone that eschews so much of the rote rhythms and expectations flooding the market these days. Get on its wavelength, and it'll take you where you want to go; you've just got to break out of the mold of your own expectations.

The Power of the Dog (2021)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I'm always a little skeptical when one movie sweeps awards and is widely touted as the "best" of the year, and so it took me a while to muster up the energy to open Netflix and finally watch its latest Oscarbait. And now I'm angry that I waited and heartbroken that this one wasn't released in cinemas.

The Power of the Dog is a masterful movie by writer and director Jane Campion, whose films (and miniseries) are usually great anyway. The Kiwi auteur this time shoots her homeland to look like Montana in the 1920s, a bare and beautiful landscape mostly untouched except for lonely, winding paths under rugged hills. Much like the land, the story Campion tells -- apparently adapted from a novel of the same name, for which I'm now hunting -- is bereft of fluff. Uncompromising and straightforward, it centers on the internal lives of a small family on the brink of society, eking out their livelihoods on the edges of what is known. We are given no flashbacks or really much context; any history between characters is mentioned in dialogue and left in the past; instead, we're made to study the faces of these characters in close-up much as we would study a landscape painting, reading paragraphs of detail in the actors' chiseled faces.

Phil and George Burbank are wealthy brothers who run a successful ranch. Upon meeting a widowed innkeeper named Rose (Kirsten Dunst), George (Jesse Plemons) decides to get married, and soon Rose and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move into the stately Burbank ranch. With George's money, Peter can go to school and study medicine and surgery. Phil, however, is not pleased; his rough-and-tough demeanor and hardworking isolationist attitude have made him the leader of the cowboys, and he sees weakness in his brother's affection. Moreover, he seems to see Rose as a leech on his family's resources, and he hates Peter for his effeminate mannerisms. Even in their first meeting, Phil verbally abuses Peter to the point of Peter leaving the dining hall where he works and Rose crumples into tears; he dominates the atmosphere of any social interaction with sharp words and abject cruelty. Here, he's a wolf in dirty clothes, lashing out at anyone on a whim. Cumberbatch is playing a villain, to be sure, but not as he's done before in The Desolation of Smaug or Star Trek Into Darkness; he's not particularly having fun here, just sinking his teeth into a raw and meaty role for the first time in what feels like ages. I would never have thought of casting him in a Western (August: Osage County was about as close as I expected he'd get to it), but he owns this movie like Phil would.

And while Phil's presence threatens to overwhelm the film, the other characters get a lot of quality time to shine, especially Rose and Peter, who react very differently to Phil's abuse. Rose crumples utterly; as the sex Phil doesn't desire and the leech he doesn't want, she represents an existential threat to him, and so he torments her relentlessly to the point of driving her to suicidal alcoholism and an inability to express herself musically or even verbally. Peter initially hides, a scrawny and limp-wristed kid, before he and Phil strike an uneasy but sudden and intense camaraderie. Doubtlessly feeding into Rose's sense of panic, Phil becomes a sort of mentor to Peter in everything from skinning cows to riding horses, and his influence over the boy remains somewhat mysterious during the latter half of the film. Peter works hard to appreciate and even embrace the rugged masculinity of his frontier foster father-figure, and we increasingly get the idea that Phil's rough exterior is little more than a coping mechanism for unspeakable desires he has long denied himself.

The secrets and desires flying between each character, fascinating in their transparency and fleeting acknowledgments, also inform the aesthetics of the film. Jonny Greenwood's score -- primarily string instruments -- make the sweeping film feel like a chamber piece, one whose notes soar until they zing. You can almost see the ways in which power dynamics shift between characters through the music, and for what is essentially "just" a drama about Western masculinities, the score and color scheme feel increasingly like they could tip into another genre, namely psychological thriller, at any moment. Actually, I'd place this movie in the same vein as American Beauty or Little Children in terms of this kind of tone, and for its acute analysis of American gender dynamics under the constraints of civil respectability. Despite appearing to be a peaceful, relatively uneventful watch, The Power of the Dog is a masterclass in nuance on all fronts, a stunning example of beautiful filmmaking that trusts its audience to do a lot of work in parsing out its delicate, sensuous, emotional strands as if unwinding strings of a rope.