‘CognAItive’ FrightFest 2025 Review: A Creative Look At An AI Uprising
The topic of an AI uprising has been on our minds for many years now, and CognAItive tackles the issue in a more direct way than some will be comfortable with. However, the film also sprinkles in plenty of humor and fun kills along with its warning of AI overlords. Making his feature debut, director Tommy Savas brings Angie Simms’ inventive screenplay to life with enough skill to make CognAItive one of the most unique AI-related horror films of the year.
The film introduces us to a group of Silicon Valley rejects working for an Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg Wannabe called Ethan (Noel Fisher) at an AI tech company that seems to be going nowhere. Ethan views himself as a tech messiah who will change the world. But his employees view him as an overbearing jerk with delusions of grandeur. Then, things become deadly when Ethan’s planned revolutionary AI becomes all too sentient and begins massacring employees who don’t obey its every command.
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Piper Curda stars as Kaya, a highly talented techie who clearly deserves better than the dead-end startup she finds herself working in, with Curda’s performance clearly conveying Kaya’s skills and her determination to succeed. When the proverbial shit hits the fan, Kaya finds herself in a desperate struggle to survive against the killer AI and the legions of deadly household appliances doing its bidding.
Although the plot takes a while to get going and the horror elements don’t kick in for a while, once the AI proclaims its dominance over the workers, the tension skyrockets. And while there aren’t a huge number of kills on screen, the deaths shown are comically gruesome and implausible. Kaya’s co-workers include Wes (Josh Zuckerman), KJ (Ritesh Rajan), and Liza (Natasha Behnam), with each actor making their roles memorable and comedic. It’s obvious that the suspenseful and absurd elements of the story allow the cast to have a lot of fun with their roles.
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The filmmakers also clearly wanted to make themselves seem smart by adding tons of tech-based jargon into the dialogue, a desperate attempt to make CognAItive seem more profound than it actually is. There are also computer screens filled with incomprehensible lines of web code displayed at regular intervals, because the makers of CognAItive really want you to know that they understand computers. And the overbearing soundtrack, which was played in most scenes, became irritating after a while. But the actual AI is still incredibly creepy and menacing, especially thanks to its constantly calm and emotionless voice that’s disturbingly almost human.
Despite its slow first act, CognAItive ultimately delivers a fun and brutal story of why technology should always be kept in check. Although it was ultimately not as deep or profound as it might have hoped, the film is still a uniquely creative interpretation of how an AI uprising might go down.
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CognAItive
Summary
The apparent seriousness of its message about the dangers of AI never quite hits the right spot, but CognAItive is still a very inventive and decidedly absurd look at what could happen if AI eventually does become self-aware.
Categorized: Reviews
