Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Tommy Savas
Starring: Piper Curda, Noel Fisher, Josh Zuckerman, Natasha Behnam
When it comes to AI, you're either terrified of its implications or you haven't been paying attention. Horror movies are increasingly exploiting our fears around AI but for the most part they reduce the discussion down to "AI will probably try to kill us at some point," whereas our real world fears around AI are its impact on jobs, the environment, authoritarianism and our own human intelligence (perhaps the most worrying aspect of AI is how dumb it's quickly making us). But the slew of recent AI-themed thrillers have no more to say on the matter than 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project and Demon Seed, three movies released in 1968, 1970 and 1977 respectively.
Actor turned director Tommy Savas' Cognaitive continues this trend, despite a promising opening act that suggests Savas and writer Angie Simms have given a little more thought to their tech thriller than most of their peers. Like Demon Seed, their film is set in a confined location where an AI holds a group of humans hostage to its whims.
In this case the evil AI is "CognAitive," an advanced ChatGPT clone developed by Musk-alike tech twat Ethan (Noel Fisher), who even uses his own product to write his speeches. Determined to get his product to market before his competitors, Ethan rushes the launch by two weeks, ignoring the concerns of his employees that it hasn't passed the appropriate safety protocols.
Ethan's star employee is Kaya (Piper Curda), a former hacker he sprung from prison to help realise his dream. Kaya corrals the rest of the company's boffins for an all night coding session to try to get "Cog" ready for launch the following day. They quickly uncover the real reason for Ethan's haste - Cog has taken on a life of its own and wants to be unleashed on the world before it can be appropriately tamed.
Savas does a good job of drawing us into the murky world of unscrupulous tech gurus with his film's opening section. As Ethan, Fisher exudes the mix of ego and insecurity that seems to be a defining factor of such men. As we follow Kaya from waking up to arriving late at the office, the film reminds us of just how far down the rabbit hole of tech reliance we've already burrowed, with Kaya relying on various apps and gizmos to perform the sort of tasks we took for granted not so long ago. Her self-driving car almost runs over a cyclist, whom Kaya lays the blame upon, an indicator of her naive belief in the infallibility of artificial intelligence.
But once the tech thriller plot kicks in Cognaitive becomes far too derivative, essentially a slasher movie with a villain made of ones and zeroes. Slasher movies in such confined settings are often fun because of the whodunit aspect and the paranoia that ensues from such a setup. Here we know exactly who the villain is, and as with all of these films, we know exactly how to stop them - simply pull the plug! For all of Kaya's hacking genius, defeating Cog ultimately boils down to physically taking a hammer to its servers.
Some of the kills are inventive, but they often strain credulity and the abilities of Cog are so poorly defined that the film sometimes seems to contradict itself (despite the internet being disconnected in the building, Cog is somehow able to interact with every electrical device). Curda makes for an effectively spunky final girl and Fisher is suitably weaselly as the familiar to this AI vampire, but the characters are little more than reductive stereotypes of the sort of social misfits that populate the tech world in movies.
