She’s the perfect girlfriend. She’s smart but not intimidating. She’s pretty but doesn’t draw too much attention to herself. She’s a good listener but doesn’t dominate the conversation. She’s good in bed but doesn’t demand her own gratification. She’s everything a man could want, and nothing he can’t handle.
The chief satirical insight of Companion, the slick and engaging new thriller from Drew Hancock, is that the preceding paragraph’s negative phrases—emphasizing a woman’s passivity, her lack of desire or independence—function as positive attributes. For the men in this movie, the platonic ideal of romantic partnership isn’t equality but compliance. They aren’t interested in being challenged or enriched; they just want to be admired and obeyed.
Then again, who am I to judge? Because in the eyes of Iris (Sophie Thatcher), her beau Josh (Jack Quaid) is a true catch: thoughtful, chivalrous, sweet. After their initial meet-cute—a charming scene where he attempts to flirt with her in the supermarket before knocking over dozens of oranges, instantly conjuring classic rom-coms—we join them as they embark on a weekend getaway at a “remote cabin in the woods,” which ends up being a mansion with a half-mile driveway. (Josh’s self-driving car, which also responds to voice commands, indicates the setting is the not-too-distant future.) But while Iris is secure in her relationship with Josh, she worries about impressing his friends, in particular Kat (Megan Suri), who greets Josh a bit too warmly and Iris a bit too coolly. Also present are Eli (Harvey Guillén), a frolicsome figure who muses about the proper plural of Xanax; Eli’s boyfriend Patrick (Smile 2’s Lukas Gage), a gifted chef and all-around dreamboat; and Sergey, the estate’s owner—a more anarchic presence whose vigorous mullet and exaggerated Russki accent acquire even greater vivacity thanks to the actor Rupert Friend.
On its surface, Companion recalls Bodies Bodies Bodies: It assembles a small number of attractive young adults in a gorgeous isolated location, then watches with a mixture of terror and amusement after one them ends up dead. But Hancock’s agenda is a bit more ambitious, both narratively and thematically. He wants to interrogate the notion of traditional romance in a putatively modern world, exploring the gap between how men present themselves as enlightened while silently nurturing cruder instincts. His keystone in this regard is Iris, a well-adjusted and appealing woman who is also, well…
It is impossible to write about Companion at even moderate length without divulging the first of its many twists, so those who wish to remain unaware are advised to stop reading now. (Or you could just watch the second trailer, which gives it away. Or you could visit a certain website whose headline spoiled things for a certain critic who certainly remains bitter.) Iris, despite her smooth features and conversational acumen, is actually a robot. Specifically she’s the titular accessory, a product with customizable settings designed to provide her owner (scratch that, she’s a rental) with any and all forms of support—emotional, intellectual, physical. She’s not a person; she’s just the ultimate way to dominate your high school reunion.
If this throws you for a loop, imagine how Iris feels. Both Companion’s deceptive structure and its thorny ideological implications require her to be oblivious to her own synthetic nature. (That memory of her first encounter with Josh at the grocery store? Turns out he selected it from a drop-down menu.) She is our point-of-view character, which means we’re automatically on her side and against Josh, who treats her, quite literally, as a piece of property, framing her for murder and branding her a technological malfunction. The incongruous arc of the movie involves Iris, who indisputably isn’t human, nonetheless attempting to assert her own agency.
This is tricky territory. Science-fiction cinema features no shortage of soulful cyborgs, but as the AI phenomenon speedily morphs from metaphorical construct to existential threat, the concept of an aggrieved android righteously vindicating itself is less appetizing than it used to. Yet the delight of Companion is how smoothly it integrates its more exotic elements into a story that is fast-paced, unpredictable, and exciting. Yes, Hancock’s screenplay contains some glancing commentary that gestures toward philosophical complexity, noting the existence of government regulations and raising questions of Asimovian ethics. (Companions are forbidden from harming others; they also can’t lie.) But it nestles these ideas within its crime-gone-wrong template, allowing them to share space without depriving the film of its more robust genre pleasures. We may recognize the troubling implications of this craven new world and Iris’ precarious place in it, but mostly we just want to see her fuck some dudes up.
We get our wish, but while you might know where this movie is going, you’re likely to be surprised as to how it gets there. Unlike most wronged robots, Iris isn’t blessed with superior strength or athleticism, instead relying on guile and craft. The same is broadly true of Companion, which abides by the rules it sets out for itself even as it enlivens Iris’ predicament with variety and wit. Simple scenes of her thinking quickly, as when she maps the potential branches of a decision tree or alters her primary language (ja!), crackle with suspense.
Thatcher, burnishing her scream-queen credentials in the wake of Heretic, doesn’t really try to partition Iris into a dual creature, instead playing up her wounded alienation. (The look on her face when she discovers that Josh set her Intelligence to 40 out of 100 is priceless.) This puts her in ironic counterpoint with Quaid, who (as in Scream) weaponizes his nice-guy blandness and warps it into something festering and sullen; the more time we spend with Josh, the less human he seems. “The world is rigged against guys like me,” he grumbles, and the line works because you know he believes it; we never find out what he does for a living, but my money is on a role in the Trump/Musk administration.
Companion stumbles a bit in its third act, abandoning its persistent cleverness in favor of more conventional mayhem. But it still unsettles as a movie that punctures a perverse form of male fantasy—not just about control, but about the perception of romance at the expense of the real thing. The customer base for these robots doesn’t appear to be horny incels but a different kind of loser: men who view women not as life partners but as arm candy. It’s pathetic, but it also lends Iris’ vengeance a frisson of satisfaction, akin to an especially cathartic breakup. And so I’ll just say to Josh, and to everyone who identifies with him: It’s not her, it’s you.
Grade: B+
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.