Spoiler alert: The following review contains mild spoilers.
Iris, the main character in writer-director Drew Hancock’s “Companion,” is nothing like your typical Hollywood love interest. As played by Sophie Thatcher, the heroine of “Yellowjackets,” Iris is more than just infatuated with her dim-witted boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid). She’s insanely loyal, willing to do whatever it takes to keep him happy, which suits her controlling partner perfectly…or so he thinks.
In the short time we spend with this highly dysfunctional couple, Iris’s docile disposition means obedience when Josh suggests they drive to an unfamiliar mansion in the middle of nowhere for a romantic weekend with four friends. It’s a doomed trip, since Iris tends to feel insecure around the other guests, including Josh’s ex Kat (Megan Suri) and her creepy Russian dad Sergei (Robert’s friend), as well as their surly gay friend Eli (Harvey Gillen) and his dim-witted toy boy. Lovely Patrick (Lucas Gage).
Although the marketing campaign wasn’t too shy, “Companion” keeps explaining what makes Iris so extraordinary throughout its 24 minutes. Only then – when Iris walks in with a knife in her hand, her blank face and pink dress splattered with blood – do we learn what some audiences might prefer to find out in this moment (come back and read this later, if you want to keep the surprise): Iris is a highly advanced sex robot, Designed to prioritize her partner’s needs. Josh runs it via a smartphone app that he hacked for nefarious reasons.
So, rather than being a slippery, crime-like “evidence,” the darkly comedic “buddy” reveals early on the identity of the killer (Josh), his weapon of choice (a jailbroken sex robot) and his motives (this is a surprise best discovered). on screen). It also teases his fate, as Iris’s opening voiceover refers to the two most important moments of her “life”: “the day she met Josh and the day she killed him.” The twisty puzzle, then, is how we get from manipulating Iris for nefarious goals to the point where she has enough personal autonomy to outmaneuver her owner, her boyfriend.
Thatcher, who went from polite and respectable to feisty free-thinker in last year’s “Heretic,” is given a more interesting role here, as her key traits change every time someone tweaks her settings. Just when Iris appears to be free of the proverbial puppet strings, Josh seizes control and forces her to endure some other humiliating humiliation, such as holding her hand over a burning flame. No matter what happens, Iris cannot escape her programming, which forces her to always be honest, but she does not abide by Asimov’s Second Rule of Robotics, which states that such a machine must not harm a human.
Quaid makes an inspired choice to play Josh as no one would expect the good-looking son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid to be a bad guy — a quality the makers of 2022’s “Scream” have exploited once before. The rest of the cast is largely type, with the exception of Buddy, who plays it off as a shady millionaire whose house is located, and whose generosity (as he believes) entitles him to help himself to Josh’s plus-one. His behavior would be implausible if Iris were a real woman, but it’s a bit more ambiguous in a movie where some people use robots for target practice.
Violence, when it happens here, tends to appear with a cold calm, which can be funny or terrifying, depending on the victim. By telling the story the way he does, through Iris’s eyes, Hancock makes us root for the robot. By keeping this open “secret” hidden for a while, “Companion” puts viewers through a Turing test of sorts: since one or more of the characters are machines, can he trick at least some of us into thinking they’re human? This is clearly a gimmick, since the cast is made up entirely of real people, but it allows the director to portray the way Iris is treated as a case of extreme gaslighting, with everyone complicit in concealing her true purpose – indulging Josh’s kinks. And laugh at his jokes.
It also gives keen viewers the false impression that they know where things are headed, when in fact events escalate into unpredictable territory once everyone settles into Sergei’s extravagant modern home. If the setting and premise seem to echo Alex Garland’s brilliant “Ex Machina,” that’s a fair comparison, though “Companion” is only about 40% as clever as the decade-old thriller. Hancock doesn’t seem equally concerned with the artistic or moral implications of his plot, setting out mostly to entertain – which he does on a grand scale.
Robot stories may be very popular right now, given the media’s focus on artificial intelligence, but “Comrade” isn’t treading new ground. It dates back to 1972, and in the same year, Ira Levin published The Stepford Wives and Michael Crichton wrote the screenplay for Westworld, marking a pop culture moment half a century ago when people were concerned about the use and abuse of machines. That people could play, and that were sympathetic enough for the audience to care about their fate. Here, Hancock brings such concerns into #MeToo talking points, criticizing how girls are socialized to meet the needs of problematic men, while also celebrating Iris’s awakening.
Directing his first film, Hancock brings a remarkable degree of control to a project that relies entirely on execution. If the timing and tone aren’t quite right, the satirical edge is ruined, and the whole enterprise may seem silly or downright bad. However, there’s a subtlety to DP Eli Born’s brilliant widescreen scores and editors, Brett W. Bachman and Josh Ethier, that unsettles viewers just enough, omitting certain information (just as “Don’t Worry Darling” did) while inviting a laugh in Moments. This might seem innocuous, if not for the satirical music choices (such as Josh and Iris’s deliberately corny encounter). If some scenes seem subtle enough to be scripted by an AI, that should be the goal in a subversive film that metaphorically seems to grow a mind when Iris comes into her own.