"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Companion

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2025 at 6:59 am and is filed under Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Thriller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

19 Responses to “Companion”

  1. This sounds better than I assumed it would be, but it really ought to be set in the CHERRY 2000 universe. It’s clear that not one single character in this movie has access to a bazooka.

  2. I enjoyed this. It reminded me a bit of UPGRADE, not just for the near-future setting and AI-related plot but in being a genre movie that’s a few notches smarter than it needs to be. I will point out that the moment [SPOILER] where she gets access to her own settings is directly lifted from TV Westworld, but I can’t complain because it’s a great fucking moment. Thatcher is reliably great (she’s a standout in Yellowjackets) and Quaid pulls off the “good guy” creep character masterfully. He’s a bit like Jimmy Stewart, able to invert his earnest sweetness into something quite scary.

  3. BuzzFeedAldrin

    May 6th, 2025 at 8:32 am

    I liked this for the most part. Agree, the casting is great (Sophie Thatcher is one of the best parts of Yellowjackets) and the premise was fun. Like most movies, it could have stood to be cut down a bit and Quaid’s character going from an incel jerk to a full fledged super villain by the end was a bit odd but overall it’s been one of the better movies I’ve seen this year!

  4. This was pretty much exactly the movie I hoped EX MACHINA would be. Loved it.

  5. I liked this one. At first I was miffed the trailer gave away the “twist,” but it gets twistier from there, upending expectations every ten minutes or so. I believe Cregger was originally set to direct this, and structurally it keeps zigging and zagging like BARBARIAN. There are also some clever bits within scenes, like when she starts speaking German because she’s unable to lie.

    Compare this to the recent ABIGAIL, which IIRC gave away the “twist” in the marketing, but waited too long in the movie to reveal it, and didn’t have enough follow-up turns.

    Jack has cemented himself as the best Quaid. I think he’s been good at picking projects. Thanks for shouting out My Adventures with Superman, which is a really, really charming and fun series.

  6. I wrote a sci fi short story 20 years ago about a young woman who wakes up in an unfamiliar setting, her boyfriend frantically asks her to help him find a memory cartridge, they fail, he finally tells her he has lost his backup of her from two years ago, and she has fallen out of love with him. Now he is going to have to start over from the beginning. She tries to run, he switches her off, the end. Clearly people have been hacking my old dead computer that I threw away a decade ago.

    I work for a high tech company that is doing a lot of bullshit AI and I have gotten into several alcohol-fueled discussions about how empty and stupid AI is thus far, and how the “Intelligence” is almost entirely missing. These things are all just guessing, and the fact that they have made really, really good models for predicting answers doesn’t mean this is valuable progress. Unless your goal is to remove the human element from every interaction and annoy the shit out of everybody with intrusive autogenerated content. Awesome, let’s waste a ton of power and resources making a future hellscape where everywhere you turn some soulless machine asks you if you want to try some new product.

    It pays well though.

  7. The Allusionist

    May 6th, 2025 at 6:17 pm

    Ex Machina is a definite point of comparison. “Companion” is entertaining enough, and Thatcher is dependably great, but I couldn’t help but feel that Alex Garland had already made a much better version of this movie in “Ex Machina”.

  8. I really like Jack Quaid, both as an actor and as a podcast guest, and he’s had a pretty busy year. He’s been the star of two (big)-ish movies in this and NOVOCAINE and then an indie drama just came out on VOD called NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH. I’ve seen and liked them all! He’s 3/3 in my opinion. I agree with Bill Reed, he’s definitely cemented himself as the best Quaid.

  9. Maybe I will give this one a try after all, everyone here had a way more positive response to this than my wife. She watched it without me last week and did not recommend it. Funnily enough, she never saw the trailer, but she said the movie was predictable and she saw every twist coming.

  10. A little off-topic, but what do we think are the odds that Vern has a SUMMER OF series on tap? The last few years in a row he’s gone back 30 years even. Following that same pattern that would be Summer of 1999. The big fish that summer was Phantom Menace (which he last reviewed in 2014), but there are some other interesting ones from that summer that he apparently hasn’t reviewed, like Eyes Wide Shut, Nottingham Hill, Deep Blue Sea and Summer of Sam. Time will tell. I wouldn’t begrudge him. Year off (those series look like work), but they are fun to read.

  11. @Bill Reed: that comparison to “Abigail” is quite apt. @The Allusionist: I described it to a friend who was reluctant to watch it as “Ex Machina” with a “Mean Girls” aesthetic.

  12. Jules, will indeed be starting a summer retrospective series soon, thanks for asking. It won’t go quite that far back but it is a summer with a Star Wars prequel (which I think I’ll refer to but not re-review since I’ve already reviewed it twice). I do feel like I need to take it a little easy this summer, so my plan is to not be quite as completist about doing every title as I usually am, but you know how I get sometimes. We’ll see what happens.

  13. That means either 2002 or 2005. Look forward to it!

  14. what got me to go check this out was another credit you didnt mention: hancock created “CAUTIONARY TALES OF SWORDS” which gives him legendary status for me. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL11188EFA74BCB03E

    i also ended up enjoying companion very much.

  15. This was more light hearted/funny than I expected it to be. It makes sense now to hear that Hancock comes from the comedy world. I liked this one quite a bit. I thought the pacing was really good. It kept moving and twisting and turning keeping your interest without being confusing or leading you down unnecessary or false paths.

    Thatcher is really good. She reminds me a little bit of Anya Taylor-Joy. Quaid is also great. That part where after her tells her **SPOILER** that she’s a robot and he says he’ll give her a moment because it all must be a lot to process and then smirks because he realizes he made a pun while she’s having a mental breakdown is just such a perfect moment showing how punchable this twat is. Which, Vern, I don’t think that scene is showing he can be kind of a good guy because he wanted to break it to her before wiping her back to factory setting. I think he needed to brag to her about it all and have a final moment of her fawning over him. Or maybe both things could be true.

  16. Yeah, between this, NOVACAINE and his appearances on BEST OF THE WORST, I’m finding myself to be a huge fan of Jack Quaid.

    Sure he’s a nepo baby (and he readily admits it), but unlike some other people than I could name, he’s using that leg up to kick in the door and get some cool projects made if at all possible. So good on ya, JQ!

    I’d also like to shout out Harvey “Gizmo” Guillen in this. I think he’s doing a lot with what he’s given here (SPOILERS) and his relationship with his robot is really touching and heartfelt even after he’s dead.

    And it is a stepping stone emotionally for us as an audience to move from seeing them as just bots to creatures that have inspired a civil rights movement even among the technicians that service them.

    And I might be slow or something, but it was only in my second watch that I realized that the lady in the other car that Thatcher waves to with her robot hand is ALSO Thatcher, but a different model. I slapped my head. Of course it is.

  17. Couldn’t meet this one halfway. Thatcher is great, but after setting her intelligence to 100%, I was thinking, what exactly does this mean? I sort of assumed it would make her do more than get stuck in a stalk-and-slash plotline.

    Also, Jack Quaid totally gets his foot run over by a car. This has never happened to me, but I assume it’s terribly damaging. Am I wrong? Because I’m pretty sure he just walks this one off really quickly.

  18. Dreadguacamole

    May 10th, 2025 at 3:45 pm

    I got my foot run over by a car as a teen when a friend turned badly into the sidewalk. I have no idea if I got off lucky, but there was no damage whatsoever, and it didn’t particularly hurt either.

  19. Yeah, I don’t have any first hand (or foot) experience with it, from what I’ve heard, depending on the size of the car, tire pressure, softness of the ground, your shoes, angle etc, having a car run over your foot can do anything from completely shattering it to just giving you a few bruises. In fact, a school mate had this happen to him once and he had “just” a broken toe. And not even a complicated break. I saw people getting worse foot injuries from tripping over something.

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