Review of Companion (d. Drew Hancock, 2025)

      We begin as we end: Companion, the longtime television writer Drew Hancock’s feature film debut, is bookended by the same monologue—delivered with equal conviction—by our protagonist, a young twenty-something woman named Iris (a very game Sophie Thatcher). “There have been two moments in my life when I was happiest. The first was the day I met Josh,” she intones, before meeting-cute with the man himself in the film’s opening scene. Aw-shucks klutz Josh (Jack Quaid, never smarmier) knocks over a stand of oranges in a supermarket, locking eyes with Iris amidst the muddle. Both instantly besotted, it’s the stuff of classic romantic comedies past, a feeling only enhanced by Iris’ retro, ‘60s a-go-go pastel wardrobe. Yet here’s the kicker: “And the second, the day I killed him.” We cut to black before the first of several jauntily contrapuntal music cues (the best, by far, coming from the Goo Goo Dolls' (in)famous anthem bearing our heroine’s name) leads us into the story proper. It’s a clever gambit that betrays Hancock’s facility for the sorts of rug-pulls and confidently-struck genre beats that Friday nights at the movies are made for. He’s got plenty more of these up his sleeve: Iris and Jack’s rejuvenating weekend getaway to a verdant lake house amidst a few friends soon reveals itself to be nothing but, with shifting allegiances, some grisly violence, and a dastardly scheme involving one very rich and possibly evil Russian boyfriend (Rupert Friend, slumming affably) at the center of it all. By the time we return to Iris’s monologue in the film’s final scene, the seeming incompatibility of the twin pillars of her happiness having been sufficiently if not satisfyingly explained, you can almost feel a roller coaster’s safety bars lifting from your lap.
 

      While I’m hesitant to spoil the best of Companion’s many surprises, I’m afraid the film’s marketing campaign has already done so for me. So let’s not beat around the bush: twenty or so minutes into the film, it is revealed that Iris is not, in fact, just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her, but a remarkably lifelike robot replete with manufactured memories and designed for all manner of human companionship (hence the title, though I suspect that’s only because “Fuckbot”—a term a devasted Iris overhears upon discovering the truth of her mass-produced identity—wouldn’t look as good on the poster). That makes Josh, the would-be paramour that acquired her services, not so much her charmingly worse half in the Hugh Grant mold of yore but something much more calculating and pathetic. Yet the film’s trailer more or less gives this away within its first thirty seconds: Iris, seemingly frozen in time and drenched in blood (which, I can confirm, is not her own), is commanded by Josh to “wake up,” and with the dulcet ping of a smartphone notification, she frantically stirs. The film’s actual poster also centers on Thatcher’s smiling visage with one uncanny tell: her eyes are all whites, no color (her name is one of the many love-it-or-hate-it ironic touches in Hancock’s script, just like how the company that created her is named “Empathix”). If you can’t take a hint, or avoid such advertisements before seeing a film, more power to you, as you’ll likely remain enthralled even as the film ties itself in knots in the second half.
 

      One last thing about that poster: above our paranoid android’s iris-less profile, we have a tried-and-true marketing tactic that scans as either a promise or a threat. “A New Kind of Love Story From the Creators of Barbarian,” it reads, and the effort taken to liken Companion to that surprise 2022 hit merits some attention. Never mind that it contentiously asserts Barbarian’s “creators” to be its three-pronged producing team, all returning here, or that its writer-director, Zach Cregger, ceded Companion’s directorial duties to Hancock after marveling at the latter’s well-developed vision for his script. While both are loud-and-proud genre pictures, they don’t necessarily belong to the same genre: Barbarian was a legit horror offering with some truly gnarly imagery, while Companion isn’t scary at all (though you may wince at some of the gore, the most inspired of which involves the usage of a corkscrew). No, their real kinship lies in their weaponizing of instantly recognizable tropes in service of stories that baroquely condemn misogyny and sexual abuse. In a late scene, Josh insists—upon all evidence to the contrary—that he’s just a “decent guy,” unjustly aggrieved, with mystifyingly little to show for it; he’s revealed to be, more or less, a self-pitying incel whose privilege isn’t paying off the way he thinks it ought to.  
 

      Quaid, of Amazon’s The Boys fame, could play this part in his sleep, and Thatcher makes for a compelling coiled spring, just as she has on Showtime’s Yellowjackets. So how come the film’s commentaries on both the harsh, sexualized inequities of relationships and the increasing capacity of technology to sate our most wretched desires ring so hollow? If anything, Hancock’s script is almost too tight, so crammed with incident, framing devices and mounting twists that it fails to provide either of its central pairing compelling inner lives. This is less of a problem for the eminently loathsome Josh than for Iris, whose dawning sense of agency nonetheless lacks the detailed psychological contouring the viewer needs to invest in her furious quest for freedom. Hancock’s most inspired touch is to center his story on a character whose intelligence may be artificial but whose experience of the world is anything but; when Josh tries to convince her that their first brush in the produce department was an implanted sham, she insists that it wasn’t. “My memory of it is real,” she says, and you believe her. What a disappointment it is, then, that this brisk, often-enjoyably mean-spirited debut fails to live up to Iris’s capacious sense of possibility. Too often, it lives down to Josh’s conception of her: a well-oiled, eager-to-please machine.

Reviewed 2/08/2025