2025 | rated R | starring Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Harvey Guillen, Lukas Gage, Rupert Friend | written & directed by Drew Hancock | 3 1/2 out of 5 stars |
Oh boy, do I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about Companion. It’s both kind of terrible (on a macro level) and kind of terrific (on a micro level) at the same time.
Josh (Jack Quaid, Scream V) and Iris (Sophie Thatcher, Yellowjackets), meet their friends for a couple’s weekend at a lakeside cabin in the woods. But when one of the guys (Rupert Friend, everything) gets aggressive with Sophie she fights back resulting in a series of escalating events and revelations, the first of which is that Iris is actually Josh’s robot girlfriend.
Let’s start with the good, because there is a lot of it. Companion has a very clever script that unfolds one smart twist at a time that both raises the stakes and reveals new levels of the characters. I love movies about couples that have to go up against each other and the way Thatcher and Quaid play the conflict, that he’s using her and she’s angry at him and they both still harbor feelings for each other – and that each of those is of questionable origin – is fascinating all the way through. The movie sets up its own universe of rules with how the robots work. That they can’t lie, that they are controlled by a phone app that can turn up and down their intelligence and aggression and that they can be imprinted on the user. Then writer/director Drew Hancock has his characters twist, exploit and bend those rules for their own selfish purposes is a ton of fun. Few recent movies set up their problem and solve it as cleverly as Iris does when she is pulled over by a cop here while being covered in blood after murdering someone.
The movie shares a lot of DNA with producer Zach Creeger’s previous movie Barbarian, though I would argue Companion is a lot smarter and a lot smoother in how it shifts into its twists than that movie. But like Barbarian it is a refreshing cocktail of genres, effortlessly moving from a rom-com to a slasher movie to a Terminator-style sci-fi film. Performances are great all around with Thatcher handling all of Iris’s whirlwind of emotions perfectly and Jack Quaid continuing his streak of playing the world’s worst boyfriend, yet still making you want him to come around and do the right thing. On a minute-to-minute level, Companion is a thriller with a refreshing take on technology.
When you pull out things start to get hairier and the movie reveals itself to be a sort of well-made piece of pro-AI propaganda with a gender war message that it doesn’t quite seem to understand. Companion’s messages place it squarely in a nexus of feminism and AI. At the end of the day, Iris is a robot. She is a thing. Not a girl, not a woman, not a person. She does not have emotions, those emotions are fake, her memories are fake. And yet this movie, like every AI company in the real world, wants us to pretend a simulacrum of emotions is just as real. That because Iris looks like a pretty girl and sounds like a female, that if she is mistreated that says something about you as a person. That mistreating a robot is more like kicking a dog or abusing a real girl than it is like banging on the side of a printer. It’s the same reason our GPS navigation and Amazon Alexas all have female voices: so we will relate to them. It’s the same reason that all throughout movie history, movie heroes and villains have been defined as such by how they treated women. The villain was instantly defined by the guy that slapped a woman, the hero the guy who defended her. Wrapping this all into AI proliferation says less about us and more about the people proliferating the AI.
We’re supposed to think that Iris is a metaphor for how men want to “own” or “control” women. That this movie would pay out almost no differently if Iris were real vs being a robot. It’s a misplaced inversion of using a sci-fi technology to satirize the real world. Everything Josh does in this movie to Iris is because she is a robot – and everything he can do to her is because she is controlled by an app. It really doesn’t align to a real-world woman at all. Companion thinks it’s telling a story about women under the guise of a robot, when it’s telling a story about robots under the guise of pretending to be women. In an attempt to white knight and play into Hollywood tales of toxic masculinity, it falls right into a mold of being very smart, very well-made but unmistakably pro-AI propaganda.
Again, I really enjoyed this movie, would recommend it to people and would probably watch it again, but let’s be clear what we’re watching here and why it’s something to debate and discuss.
If The Terminator were made today, the Terminators would be the heroes fighting against the sexism and bigotry of humans whose time on this Earth needs to come to an end. That’s how things have flipped in the last 40 years. It’s not correct, it’s just fashionable.