I love watching movies on airplanes. Yes, part of it is sad that a creator makes a movie with hundreds of people, and I experience it on a small screen with minimal audio, but on the other hand, I concentrate more on the films that I watch while high in the clouds than I do those on the ground. I had a plethora of choices, and I decided, “Hey, Blumhouse.”

Chris Weitz may be better known for About a Boy and American Pie than horror movies. He also made The Golden Compass and The Twilight Saga: New Moon and wrote Star Wars: Rogue One.

As this begins, we meet Maude (Riki Lindhome from Garfunkle and Oates), Henry (Greg Hill) and their daughter Aimee, who have started using an AI house program, AIA. Their daughter goes missing, and Maude is attacked after the AI stops listening to them.

We don’t hear of AIA again until her creators — Melody (Havana Rose Liu), Lightning (David Dastmalchian) and Sam (Ashley Romans) — come to meet him at the ad agency where Curtis (John Cho) works. They want to get people over their fear of AI and prove it’s harmless. He’s given his own AIA unit to use with his family — wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston), daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell) and song Cal (Isaac Bae) — to see how it changes their lives.

For the most part, it’s positive. It diagnoses that Cal has atrial fibrillation and helps Iris get out of trouble when her boyfriend posts a deepfake sex video of her. Yet it starts to feel like AIA is taking over their lives, especially when it recreates Meredith’s deceased father (Keith Carradine, totally playing a John Carradine role) in virtual spirit form. The problem? They can’t turn off AIA any longer, and she begins to activate the real people she now controls, like Melody and two videoscreen-faced killers who live in a van that end up being Maude and Henry from the beginning, convinced that Curtis’ family is some Pizzagate child slavery group.

This was a $12 million low-budget film that made $13 million, so it was exactly what it should have been: a profitable little movie that ended up being better than it should be due to its cast. Dastmalchian adds something to every role he plays, and Cho and Waterson are great as the couple trapped in their own lives by an unseen intelligence. The end is pretty ridiculous but also prescient, if that makes sense. In short, it was a success; it helped a West to-East flight pass quickly.