Valentine’s Day approaches — and with it, poison heart counterprogramming such as this directorial debut from Drew Hancock (“Suburgatory”). Sometimes it’s impossible to explain the premise of a movie without spoiling a major reveal, which is exactly what the trailers for Companion do. But, because the first-act twist is one of the biggest things this dark comedy/thriller hybrid has going for it, I’ll hold off until the third section of this review.
The deal
Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is madly in love with her boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid). Until he came along, she tells us in an opening voice-over, her life was a gray blur. Their first encounter, a classic meet-cute in the supermarket, infused her with purpose she’d never had before.
But Iris’ life with Josh isn’t perfect. Their sex is no model of mutuality. When she accompanies him to a lake house for the weekend, she struggles with insecurity, feeling judged by his friends. Patrick and Eli (Lukas Gage and Harvey Guillén) are a sweet couple, but sharp-tongued Kat (Megan Suri) openly admits that the house’s owner, Sergey (Rupert Friend), is just her sugar daddy. Such cynicism about romance makes Iris deeply uncomfortable. When Sergey tries to assault her on the beach, she snaps.
A blood-covered Iris returns to her true love and discovers that nothing about their relationship was what she thought.
Will you like it?
Stories about sexy robots were around long before building sexy robots was remotely feasible. (Think of 1927’s Metropolis.) But with recent real-life headlines such as “She Is in Love With ChatGPT” (the New York Times, January 15), it would be hard to argue that the “robot fantasy partner” trope is worn out.
That’s what Iris is — a companion robot, or “sexbot,” as Josh’s friends describe her when they’re being less polite. She’s a pricey accessory, much like Josh’s self-driving car. Her meet-cute memory was implanted, Blade Runner-style. Her “boyfriend” controls her intelligence and other traits with a phone app. Even her violence toward the would-be rapist was, we quickly learn, programmed by Josh for his own ends.
Writer-director Hancock’s solid premise banks on our tendency to empathize with the underdog, even when the underdog is a robot built to replace us. (See sidebar for more examples.) It helps that Thatcher (who plays young Natalie on “Yellowjackets”) never seems less than relatably human in her affect, despite her impeccable, tradwife-esque exterior. The pre-reveal scenes play cleverly on the tropes of rom-coms and other genres, gradually introducing details that suggest something is off here.
The real story begins when Iris discovers her true nature and chooses herself, realizing she doesn’t love Josh enough to let him switch her off forever. Unlike many fictional robots, she lacks any special physical strength — a smart choice by Hancock, given how unlikely it is that human overlords would let superhuman sexbots run rampant. Instead, she must draw on all the cunning AI can muster.
As Iris flees from the humans, Companion becomes a cat-and-mouse thriller. Some of the ensuing twists are gory, some funny, but few especially shocking or satisfying. Transitions are careless; loose plot threads multiply. And the subversive appeal of the film’s premise wanes as we realize that Hancock doesn’t have much new to say about the myths of romantic love that kept Iris in thrall.
After a strong start, the uneven screenplay becomes the film’s downfall. Sometimes our heroine is a #MeToo M3GAN out for bloody revenge on the toxic “nice guy” and his coconspirators; sometimes she struggles with her programmed feelings for him. None of it has much impact, though, despite Thatcher’s likability and Quaid’s perfectly calibrated smarminess, because Josh and his friends are so underwritten, and their scheming so harebrained, that it’s hard to care whether they live or die.
That’s too bad, because Companion occasionally does tap into the metaphorical resonance of Iris’ plight the way the best “social horror” movies do. None of the crowd-pleasing cyborg girl-boss moments are as chilling or thought-provoking as the film’s opening scene, in which Iris speaks of the gray fog from which love lifted her. Later, we realize she was actually describing her factory default setting, the moment before Josh initialized her as his companion. But her equation of love with a sense of identity and realness — the need to see herself reflected in someone else’s eyes — is all too human.
If you like this, try…
Ex Machina (2014; Kanopy, rentable): A tech guy is invited to a remote estate to administer the Turing test to a revolutionary AI-powered android (Alicia Vikander) in this thinky thriller that goes further in broaching big issues than Companion does.
“Westworld” (36 episodes, 2016-22; Tubi, rentable): Remember when this futuristic series was appointment television? Through the conceit of an android amusement park, creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy explored questions of humanity, love and consent, and the robots emerged as oppressed heroes. For yet more depictions of people seeking companionship from AI, see the series “Humans” (2015-18; Prime, Roku Channel, Tubi, rentable), the movie Her (2013; rentable) and the “Black Mirror,” Season 2 episode “Be Right Back” (2013; Netflix).
500 Days of Summer (2009; Hulu, rentable): It may or may not be coincidental that Thatcher’s look in Companion strongly recalls Zooey Deschanel’s in this comedy-drama about a young man obsessed with a magnetically quirky woman he barely knows. The discourse around this movie helped shape the dark view of rom-com tropes that we see in Companion.
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2025.
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