CognAItive is far from the first AI-centric horror this year, and it certainly won’t be the last. After all, it’s fairly easy pickings – the concept of a machine growing enough sentience to spark a killing spree is one of the oldest in the genre movie playbook. And after several years of every tech company on the planet trying to force us to become best friends with our computers, to say it’s fresh in the mind would be an understatement. ChatGPT itself is probably being used to write any number of similar, AI-sploitation movies as we speak.
And while that doesn’t really do Tommy Savas and Angie Simms’ techno slasher a whole lot of favours when it comes to originality, it does give it a slightly disposable charm. CognAItive plays out exactly the way you’d expect; a small group of hot young 20-somethings get trapped in a cool start-up office by their own AI (a seemingly faultless ChatGPT clone) that slowly picks them off one by one, despite not having a body or any physical presence.
It’s a familiar novelty; a cheap slasher without an actual killer, subbing in a voiceless bit of code that possesses electrical objects (sometimes in nonsensical ways) and occasionally blackmails people into doing its bidding. But as fun as it is watching a remote-control drone burying its blades into a nerdy guy’s jugular, it does make you realise quite quickly just how imaginative the writing needs to be, and how important having a Jason, or a Michael, or even an Annabelle actually is, when you’re making something this straightforward.
One setting, six characters, and not a whole lot of incident or drama outside of the killing is fine when you pack in a whodunnit mystery, or the tension (and occasional goofiness) of a masked killer stalking its victims, but here there’s nothing. One machine, one mission and one very clear way to stop it. CognAItive doesn’t even give it’s eponymous chatbot much of a personality either – there’s nothing and no one to root for here, just a dull, repeated order to off the humans, and a very limited number of ways to actually make it happen.
Piper Curda’s bad-girl coder Kaya is driven enough as the film’s heroine to feel punky and exciting, and Natasha Behnam’s shroom-popping resident Gen-Z Liza steals every single one of the script’s best jokes. But beyond that, things are ironically pretty lifeless.
Both the brief nods at satirical humour and Savas and Simms’ attempts at reckoning with the philosophy of AI feel creaky. There does seem to be a desire to be part of the bigger ethical conversation, and to actually have an opinion on the direction AI is going, which in itself is commendable. But this also does seem to just boil down to “AI is bad”. And considering this is an 80-something minute indie horror with the tagline “AI is here to slay”, giving space to those ideas instead of ramping up the film’s campier side feels pretty misguided.
With the right amount of scale and imagination, there is fun to be had with this new wave of AI-sploitation. It doesn’t even need to feel overwhelmingly original to have an impact (it’s a pretty obvious shout to say that the runaway computer trope that’s been floating through the genre since 2001: A Space Odyssey, certainly has legs). But CognAItive is living proof that you can’t just throw those same repeated tropes at the wall without much personality, and expect a killer outcome.
CognAItive screened as part of FrightFest 2025.
