Iris, the main character of writer-director Drew Hancock’s disturbed dating film “Companion,” is not like your typical Hollywood love interest. As played by “Yellowjackets” star Sophie Thatcher, she is more than a little in love with her dorky boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid). She is a devoted woman and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep him happy, which suits her controlling partner just fine… or so he thinks.
During the brief time we spend with this highly dysfunctional couple, Iris’s docile disposition means she obediently joins Josh when he suggests they head to an unfamiliar mansion in the middle of nowhere for what is billed as a romantic weekend with four friends. It’s an excursion doomed to failure, as Iris tends to feel insecure around the other guests, who include Josh’s ex, Kat (Megan Suri), and her creepy Russian sugar daddy, Sergey (Rupert Friend), as well as her catty gay friend Eli (Harvey Guillén) and her adorable, goofball toy Patrick (Lukas Gage).
Director: Drew Hancock
Writer: Drew Hancock
Stars: Sophie Thatcher, Harvey Guillén, Jack Quaid
Though the marketing campaign hasn’t been all that coy, “Companion” keeps the explanation of what makes Iris so unusual under wraps for 24 minutes. It’s only then, when Iris walks in with a knife in her hand, her face expressionless and her pink dress splattered with blood, that we learn what some viewers might prefer to find out in the moment (re-read this later, if you want to retain the surprise): Iris is a highly sophisticated sex robot, designed to prioritize the needs of her partner. Josh operates her through a smartphone app, which he hacked for nefarious reasons.
So rather than being a “Clue”-style whodunit, the darkly comic “Companion” reveals early on who the killer (Josh) is, his weapon of choice (a sex robot released from prison), and his motive (that’s a surprise best uncovered onscreen). It also gives clues about his fate, as Iris’s opening voiceover references the two most important moments of her “life”: “the day I met Josh and the day I killed him.” The convoluted mystery, then, is how we go from Iris being manipulated for nefarious purposes to the point where she has enough personal autonomy to outwit her owner, i.e. boyfriend.
Thatcher, who went from polite and deferential to feisty free thinker in last year’s “Heretic,” has an even more interesting arc here, as her key traits change every time someone adjusts her settings. Just when it seems like Iris has broken free of the puppet strings, Josh takes over and forces her to endure some other degrading humiliation, such as holding his hand over a burning flame. No matter what happens, Iris can’t escape her programming, which requires her to always be truthful but is not governed by Asimov’s second rule of robotics, which dictates that such a machine must not harm a human.
Quaid makes an inspired choice to play Josh, as no one expects the harmless-looking son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid to be a bad guy — a quality the creators of 2022’s “Scream” exploited once before. The rest of the cast is largely typical, with the exception of Friend, who behaves like a shady millionaire whose home is — and whose generosity (he believes) entitles him to help himself to Josh’s companion. Her behavior would be out of the question if Iris were a real woman, but it's a bit more ambiguous in a movie where some people use droids for target practice.
The violence, when it happens here, tends to be shown with a cold, detachedness that can be either funny or terrifying, depending on the victim. By telling the story as she does, through Iris's eyes, Hancock makes us root for the robot. By keeping this "secret" open for a while, "Companion" puts the audience through a kind of Turing test: Since one or more of the characters are machines, can she fool at least some of us into believing they're human? That's a trick, obviously, since the cast is made up entirely of real people, but it allows the filmmaker to frame the way Iris is treated as a case of extreme manipulation, where everyone is complicit in hiding her true purpose: to please Josh's perversions and laugh at his jokes.
It also gives perceptive viewers the false impression that they know where things are headed, when in fact events spiral out of control into unpredictable territory almost as soon as everyone has settled into Sergey's extravagant modern home. If the location and premise seem to echo Alex Garland's masterful "Ex Machina," that's a fair comparison, though "Companion" is only about 40% as clever as the decade-old thriller. Hancock doesn't seem all that interested in the implications of the film.
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