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How Companion Inverts Expectations

The “girl takes revenge on a gaslighting/abusive partner” genre of thriller has become quite popular in the last decade or so for what I hope are some pretty obvious reasons. But like any other trend, it can quickly get drab and formulaic as studios simply crank them out without thought or anything beyond surface-level interest in modern gender politics in relationships. That is exactly what I expected Companion to be, an early-in-the-year thriller about a companion robot girl violently lashing out against the misogynist man who programmed her. We’ve even seen essentially this very premise done in a phenomenal way in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.
And indeed writer-director Drew Hancock doesn’t have Garland’s fascination with the existentialist and ethical implications of robots designed in some way to be mere sexual objects for men. But what he does have is a sense of humour about it. While losing none of its messaging, Companion is actually broadly fun in how it approaches its chosen material, comments on sexual objectification and male insecurity, and taps some really good actors to play into that. It’s not altogether distinct or free of contrivance, but it does have more going for it than is initially apparent.
The film’s focal character is Iris (Sophie Thatcher), an anxious young woman emphatically devoted to her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid), who learns after a dramatic incident at a lake house with their friends that her memories are a lie and she is in fact a companion robot to Josh, controlled via his phone. Because he illegally jail-broke her settings to get away with a crime, he is forced to shut her down. However she escapes, coming to terms with her reality as Josh and his friends attempt to hunt her down.
By the time the nature of her identity is revealed, the film has already leaned considerably into the hyperbole of this relationship. It never quite breaches the absurd, but the fact of Iris’s every waking thought being on Josh, and especially the hideous cliché of their supposed meeting, tunes you into the fantasy while subtly mocking the clear insecurities of a guy like Josh through the way he had her programmed. And though there’s menace attached as well, as we experience this revelation through Iris’s perspective where such feelings felt demonstrably real -and of course the harrowing nature of not so much the crime as what manner Josh was inclined to facilitate it in- the film is perhaps smartly as interested in ridiculing its premise as playing it for thrills.
Particularly Hancock seems to have fun envisioning this technology through the modern corporate mobile app lens -advanced artificial intelligence as mere consumer commodity that its users have an incredibly laissez-faire attitude towards. Josh in breaking the news to Iris about what she is, is coolly flippant about it -the shock of her worth to him being equivalent to a sentimental appliance given amusing texture by his crassness, his casual demonstration of his powers over her, and his largely self-serving reluctance to cast her as just a sexual object -even as it is clear this was his primary reason for buying her. There's something too in just how forwardly Quaid plays and Hancock structures such a pathetic personality. It is a funny dichotomy just generally, this pairing of the android existential depth of Blade Runner with the shallowness of our modern relationship to technology -especially amongst the kind of AI art enthusiast crypto-bro types who would be the first in line for an adoring sex-bot substitute for a real relationship.
Quaid makes for a great avatar for this kind of guy, and plays the part with a reckless confidence and undue sense of moral superiority. He also shifts very well between silly, lackadaisical dweeb and dangerous incel driven by entitlement and desperation -the qualities of the latter actually feeding into the qualities of the former in entertaining ways (certainly some of the lengths he goes to when Iris outsmarts him a couple times). His small squad of friends consists of a standoffish Megan Suri, a lecherous Rupert Friend, and a cheesy couple in Harvey Guillén and Lukas Gage -who join in his efforts to dismantle Iris, to predictable results. But it is Iris, and specifically Sophie Thatcher, who drives much of the movie. Companion is as much a showcase for Thatcher, considered by some a new Scream Queen, as anything. And certainly she defines herself here better than anything I’ve seen her in yet (I admittedly have not watched Yellowjackets). This is not a great moment in time to be making A.I. sympathetic, but Thatcher plays Iris as so believably human that you can’t help yourself. From her fear and survival instinct to even the quirks of her personality -programmed by Josh in a clever move by Hancock to get around its clichés. Really, Iris being a robot is incidental to how she is treated and scapegoated by Josh, and that’s what Thatcher hones in on effectively -the power dynamics in relationships, psychological gaslighting, and the feelings of having control exerted over you by weak, insecure men. As much as desperation, there’s an undercurrent of anger in Iris that Thatcher translates remarkably, while all the same playing the humour in this part well.
The plotting is still rather slight, as Hancock contrives new beats or obstacles to keep things on course once Iris escapes the vacation home. Mild attempts to make a couple of Josh's friends more sympathetic (contrasting him in the process) don't land with much weight, and one death in particular rings of lazy obligation. The usual tropes are rendered in very plain ways here, and the last act, despite one pretty strong minor twist, is fairly tame as Josh transforms into more of a typical abusive monster boyfriend.
The inversion however, of him as the heartless automaton while she is the figure of sentiment and empathy is a good one. In spite of the image used to sell this movie of a devious robot ready at any second to go on a killing spree by perhaps some glitch in her programming, she is a far more warm and understanding character -not to mention less violent- than the humans around her. Companion is not so drab as that promotional assumption either; and though it doesn't ultimately say much about control or toxic relationships that other movies haven't more decisively probed, the way it makes its points is plenty charming and entertaining.

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