COMPANION, which played in theaters a couple months ago and is now on disc and streaming, features certain genre elements that are strategically withheld for a while. For almost a third of its 97 minutes we can tell there’s something we’re missing about the main character because of some of the weird things people say to her, so we’re very intrigued. I don’t include myself in “we” though because I knew the premise of the movie, controversially (but understandably, I think) included in the second trailer and other promotions. There is good reason to go in blind, but I can confirm that the movie is still fun without being surprised by that part. And I’m not gonna write a review on eggshells, so I’m gonna get into it a couple paragraphs from now.

The movie is about a group of friends who go stay together at a rich guy’s fancy-ass lake house. Iris (Sophie Thatcher, MAXXXINE) is our narrator, these are friends of her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid, LOGAN LUCKY), and she’s worried she’s going to embarrass herself in front of them. Sure enough Kat (Megan Suri, IT LIVES INSIDE), who answers the door, barely acknowledges her presence. Poor Iris just stands there forcing a smile while a conversation goes on next to her.

The place belongs to Kat’s older boyfriend Sergey (Rupert Friend, A SIMPLE FAVOR), who it turns out is so loaded he owns not only this ridiculous place but all of the land around the lake, and you know what, this guy is definitely a Russian gangster, right? Nobody’s saying it, but he’s implying it.

There’s another couple there, Eli (Harvey Guillén, voice of Nightwing on Harley Quinn) and Patrick (Lukas Gage, HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE), who are a little more friendly to Iris, as she asks about how they met and gushes so much about love at first sight that even Josh squirms a little.

The reason Kat acts rudely to Iris (like opening up about Sergey using her for sex and then saying “Look who I’m talking to”) is not that she dislikes her. She’s uncomfortable talking to her because (HERE IS THE SPOILER) she knows Iris isn’t human, she’s a “companion robot,” or as Josh later says, “I hate the word ‘fuckbot’.” This is the near future and very realistic robot girlfriends and boyfriends are a popular and somewhat accepted product available for rent.

One person who did not see the trailer that spoiled this: Iris. She’s been programmed with memories so she thinks she’s a person who just happens to love Josh to uncontrollable levels. The cat is let out of the bag after Sergey tries to assault her by the lake and she stabs the shit out of him. She comes back inside drenched in blood, so Josh puts her to sleep (her eyes turn white and she freezes up), ties her to a chair and explains everything. We’d previously seen their first rom-com-worthy encounter in the produce department at the grocery store, which she’s programmed to believe, but he tells her the true story: she was delivered to his shitty apartment in a box and he cut his toenails while her software booted up. Then he had to look into her eyes, say his name and choose their meet-cute from a dropdown menu.

Okay, I said she loves Josh to uncontrollable levels, but that wasn’t true. The real excitement comes when she gets ahold of Josh’s phone and realizes she can customize herself in the app. There are menus to adjust her level of intelligence, the pitch of her voice, the color of her eyes, all kinds of things. So this is a sci-fi movie, but also an escape/revenge/tech thriller, with Iris trying to evade, fight and outsmart Josh and friends to avoid being destroyed or returned to the Empathix company. There are more suspense elements I won’t get into, plenty of intrigue to keep it interesting. Also Marc Menchaca from the John Hyams movies ALONE and SICK shows up as a sheriff’s deputy.

One of the ironies of the story is that the other relationships aren’t that much better than dumbass Josh and the fuckbot. There seems to be some judgment toward him for having a robot, but Sergey is cheating on his wife, and Kat is a mistress willing to (ANOTHER SPOILER) murder her boyfriend, who even implies he treats her like a robot. Eli and Patrick might have something closer to love but (AND ANOTHER SPOILER) that’s also a paid-for human-robot couple.

I saw an interview where writer/director Drew Hancock said he originally conceived COMPANION as what if a guy’s sex robot went crazy?, but then realized it was more interesting for the robot to be the protagonist. Josh is an accurate depiction of a certain type of toxic masculinity with multiple layers of nice guy facade you have to peel back to reveal the asshole. It seems like he has a conscience because when he’s going to deactivate and return her he first wants to say goodbye to her, which Kat thinks is ridiculous. But when he shows his true colors they are some very ugly ones. I don’t like those colors. The guy’s a jerk. But a good villain.

An odd phenomenon in our current shitstorm is that the real life dangers of generative A.I. make some of these sci-fi premises seem more off target than they used to. We’ve got the movies like THE TERMINATOR or THE MATRIX, where an artificial intelligence is trying to kill us, and movies like T2 and THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS where A.I.s can also learn to be nice. And then we have movies like this or A.I. or I, ROBOT or I think THE CREATOR (but I haven’t seen that one) where robots are conscious beings who are being persecuted and mistreated and it’s wrong. It’s a compelling story because robots are cool, they are better with personality, we want to have feelings for them and therefore we want them to have rights and freedom and happiness.

But now that something at least called A.I. is intruding on our lives it’s turning out to be a whole different problem. In the real world there are people who do believe we’re close to having either a Skynet or a disembodied Iris or a HER. These people are superstitious kooks and cultists, or rubes and marks. But in the former category there are some powerful tech oligarchs and in the latter are their investors and gullible hypemen in the media. Together with old fashioned snake oil salesmen they’re violently forcing this earth-ravaging, art-stealing, misinformation-spreading gibberish machine into our devices, our internet, now our government, maybe our schools, all for yet another bullshit stock market scam. Condescending con artists dumping more and more money into a myth, a fantasy, a fake miracle machine that transparently sucks, a real life Max Shreck power-draining plant except it steals all the energy just to create shitty-ass simulated art for fascists. It’s a bad situation, friends!

I believe ED-209 (a non-thinking machine badly misunderstanding a situation and murdering a bunch of people) could probly happen, Skynet probly not, Iris or BLADE RUNNER 2049 definitely not. The fear of people not respecting the humanity of robots only works as a metaphor when people believing robots can think is an actual current problem in the world. It’s fucking math and showmanship, man, not magic pixie dust. It will not fall in love with you. People in charge of shit who are gullible enough to believe predictive text is alive – that’s a fucking problem.

I gotta tell myself not to think about this stuff during movies so I can empathize with the robots in them. Yes, if machines could feel, I would side with Iris. Luckily COMPANION isn’t really about the possibility of machines that can think, it’s about people who want partners who can’t. Until she gains control of herself, Iris has no choice but to fawn over Josh. He’ll be nice to her sometimes, but if he gets bored he can stop and turn her off. Quaid is great casting for that – he has subverted his nice guy aura before in a slasher sequel I won’t mention, but I think he still comes off like he could be for real (see: My Adventures with Superman). At first you want to believe he’s not a piece of shit.

Of course, Thatcher carries the movie – she’s great. I caught on to her when I saw (but didn’t review) HERETIC, where she played a Mormon missionary trying not to be Christopher Hitchens-ed to death by the hot air of Hugh Grant. Then I was reminded I’d seen her as the makeup artist in MAXXXINE and the space-hipster scooter lady in The Book of Boba Fett. Those are supporting roles where she does a great job of looking cool, but here she nails a much tougher mission, walking a fine line between artificially perky and sympathetic, between cute and slightly unsettling, then turning to righteous cyber-psycho. A fun character, executed with precision.

COMPANION was promoted as “from the creators of BARBARIAN,” meaning it’s the same producers, including that movie’s director, Zach Cregger. Like Cregger, Hancock came out of comedy television, having previously directed segments on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and a Tenacious D thing, and creating TV shows including something called My Dead Ex. Now he’s developing a proposed remake of THE FACULTY. COMPANION is solid enough that I’ll keep an eye out for wherever he lands next.