The new film Companion can’t keep its big secret to itself, but it has others in store.
This article contains spoilers for the film Companion.
The new film Companion works best if you manage to stay unaware of its twisty premise—except that may be hard to do, as its marketing campaign up and reveals it. If you are able to heed my warning, however—and you want to enjoy some diverting, silly, and slightly gory horror fare—just buy a movie ticket; don’t even look at the poster. Otherwise, know that the first big surprise is one of several to come in the director Drew Hancock’s debut feature. With my promise not to kill all the remaining curiosity, you can safely proceed here.
Companion is set during a weekend getaway at a lakeside cabin. Josh (played by Jack Quaid) introduces his new girlfriend, Iris (Sophie Thatcher), to his closest pals. Here is the spoiler: Turns out, Iris is a robot. She’s an “emotional support” robot, Josh explains—his fully functional, artificial girlfriend, who’s designed to love and obey him in the bedroom and elsewhere. (Josh disdains the seemingly accurate phrase fuckbot.) This is the film’s underlying premise, recalling an installment of Black Mirror writ a little bit larger; it’s extrapolating the near-future promise and nightmare of advancing AI to imagine a world where virtual partners are progressively becoming the norm. Iris is less a Stepford wife than a really grown-up chatbot, a way for a shallow man-child like Josh to imitate connection without making any real effort.
The commentary is spiky, if obvious. Quaid has gotten good at playing a fake-feminist dork: seemingly funny and well-meaning, his charm a thin veneer for a lot of seething, nerdy resentment (his work in Scream is another fine example). Thatcher conveys Iris’s innocence quite sweetly; she’s very concerned about impressing Josh’s friends, a desire that’s simultaneously sympathetic and chilling when the viewer learns that satisfying others is part of her core programming. It soon appears that there are all kinds of perverse avenues Companion could go down in portraying Iris and Josh’s splintering relationship, especially as Josh and Iris start to interact with everyone else hanging at this lake house.
Someday, perhaps someone will make the definitive sex comedy for the incel age. But Companion is fundamentally not a satire. In fact, it’s not even properly a horror movie, despite its creepy branding and its midwinter release date (a classic dumping ground for cheap-and-cheerful shock-fests from bigger studios). The film instead evolves into a lurid knockoff of an early Coen-brothers work, something like Blood Simple with tablets. It’s the type of plot that ends in deceit, bloody murder, and further revelations about the cast of nincompoops around Josh and Iris.
As a propellant for the story and its 97-minute runtime, switching from a sci-fi-tinged chiller to a crime caper makes sense; the genre advances Companion past its novella premise into something more robust. The accompanying shift in focus—away from Josh and Iris’s relationship and toward the former’s true motivation for acquiring the robot—also gives space for another one of the weekenders (played by Lukas Gage) to have some fun toying with a secret of his own. But it ends up flattening the chances of Companion ever getting as creepy or weird as its conceit suggests it could be. A producer on the film, Zach Cregger, previously directed the sneaky, unexpected 2022 smash Barbarian, which similarly wrapped some commentary in with its scares. It was a truly unsettling work, one that played with modern foibles of masculinity in a challenging and grotesque way. Companion, meanwhile, quickly makes clear what a dingus Josh is; the film seems uninterested in deeper character study, instead just generating turns aplenty to keep up the momentum. Hints at his latent sadism come very late in the game, but Companion ties up much of Josh’s villainy in the duplicitous scheme that emerges; I’d have far preferred it probing the potentially wild ways that his robo-relationship has atrophied his empathy.
Thatcher is left to do the film’s most interesting work—perhaps unsurprisingly, to those familiar with the actor’s growing list of credits. A trick of the story is that Josh can adjust Iris’s intelligence with a smartphone-app-enabled slider; though Iris is programmed to feel absolute loyalty to her partner, her behavior is otherwise tweakable with a few taps. Thatcher gets to explore a few different directions for Iris over the course of Companion, including numbing dullness, canny super-expertise, and steely aggression on par with the Terminator. She’s more than up to the challenge; I haven’t seen her starring turn on Yellowjackets, but between this and her fine performance in last year’s Heretic, Thatcher has clearly got elevated scream-queen chops that go beyond appearing effectively frightened on-screen. She shifts among each of Iris’s emotional modes—alarmed, confused, cheerfully blank—with aplomb.
I just kept finding myself wanting a little more freaky zest and a little less speculative-fiction-style plottiness. The back half of Companion gets more deeply into the rules of these robots’ operating systems as it tries developing the cat-and-mouse game that arises between Josh and Iris. Although expanding the lore was probably unavoidable, it also feels like a mistake—more answers only raise more questions about these artificial life forms, which seem to be close to fully autonomous but for a couple of safety toggles on an app. The resolution to every narrative gap amounts to the characters themselves being inept or ill-informed, a Coen brothers’ specialty that Quaid does his best to imitate. His progressively growing ignorance makes it harder and harder to find Josh very scary, however, as the film ramps up into more graphic violence. Companion is at best a mean little confection, no matter how much you know going into it: amusing, occasionally thrilling, but not something with the capability to linger.
