Flasz On Film

If you want to find out what genre Companion ought to be filed under, Wikipedia will inform you that it is a science fiction dark comedy thriller. It takes at least five words to describe the shelf it should be put back onto and at this point I think I might have to insist either on adding a few extra words to describe this genre or alternatively substituting the genre description with a suitable phrase that would let you know what you’re agreeing to witness when buying a ticket. And that’s because if you were to trust the utterly aggressive marketing promoting this movie—which cost allegedly three times the amount it took to produce it in the first place—you’d convince yourself that Companion might be one of those genre-bending mind-sizzlers that offers an intellectual conversation on the way home after having you sit through a visceral roller coaster ride of sorts.  

Which it is. Sort of. With caveats.  

In truth, there’s very little you can infer from how Companion is advertised and the only thing you have to go on is “from the creators of Barbarian” adorning the marquee, which combined with the imagery of a young woman with her hand on fire and an expectation that somehow this movie is going to be about a woman who does not know she’s a robot and then finds out what she is and then perhaps all hell breaks loose in the aftermath of this discovery, could lead you to assume that this movie, a directorial debut from one Drew Hancock (so that doesn’t help you contextualize this work either, now does it?), might dabble somewhere close where movies like Ex Machina, or Upgrade did in the not-too-distant past, but with a more distinct genre flavour to it and perhaps with a whiff of the kind of post-#MeToo we might remember from movies like Cat Person or Don’t Worry Darling.  

However, what I personally find interesting is that while all these descriptors are technically true, watching this movie will also tell you just how far they are from what Companion truly is. And it all begins with its set-up as we are greeted by an off-screen narration delivered by Iris (Sophie Thatcher whom you might remember from Heretic or The Boogeyman) who tells us upfront about how she met the love of her life Josh (Jack Quaid) in a supermarket aisle, how her knees buckled and butterflies filled her belly, and how she also admitted that the day she ended up killing him—which presumably would take place before the credits roll; talk about a Hitchcockian reveal—was one of the best days in her life.  

What then follows is a brief scene in which Iris and Josh are driving together to a remote cabin in the woods, which then turns out to be more aptly described as a remote mansion at a private lake owned by a weirdly rambunctious Russian businessman with a mullet and a big mouth named Sergey (Rupert Friend), where Josh’s friends, Kat (Megan Suri who has recently starred in It Lives Inside), Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage whom you might remember from Euphoria or The White Lotus but whom I place as one of the cast of Smile 2) are also going to stay for the weekend. Interestingly, none of these friends seem to approve of Iris and it honestly doesn’t take more than three minutes for you to add two and two together and surmise that Iris is Josh’s companion robot and not a real girlfriend. However, the movie ploughs on unperturbed and treats the eventual reveal as though it was a big twist—twenty minutes into the movie, by the way—after it turns out that Iris comes back from the lakeshore having stabbed Sergey to death. From there events escalate even further as we find out that this whole weekend retreat was carefully planned so that Iris dispatching Sergey would be ascribed to malfunctioning equipment going rogue and that Josh, Kat, Eli and Patrick would take off with Sergey’s wealth he had stashed in the house. What complicates matters is the fact that Iris finds out she is a robot and decides to take matters into her own hands in an act of sentient defiance against her owner whom she had seen as a romantic partner until that point.   

And it’s all well and good because on paper this set-up sounds enticing and potentially capable of finding its place as that more genre-aware equivalent of Ex Machina meshed somewhat with Don’t Worry Darling; a movie that promises to be a fun and quirky affair steeped in entertainment that also has something to say about culturally relevant stuff, like the looming threat of AI encroaching on our relationships and the many ways in which men and women drift away from each other. But this isn’t the movie I watched. It’s the movie I wish Companion was (and I think the filmmakers were after making), but the movie I got just did not come close to even attempting an outright conversation it could have had with the audience while serving them thrills and chills. What this movie is—ironically enough—is an ersatz. A bought and paid-for synthetic equivalent of a movie that’s smart, self-aware and effective that doesn’t fathom just how far from the real thing it really is.  

It is honestly quite embarrassing because watching Companion you can see just how little it would have taken to push this movie into territory of culturally lasting and relevant entertainment that both works in the moment and perhaps is able to persist for months and years as a data point in how our relationship with technology and the widely understood gender dynamics are reflected in movies. You can literally take the same structural conceit—the set-up, the murder plot, the chaos that ensues—and just push it a few inches closer to the edge when it matters. Lean into the ambiguous nature of Josh and Iris’s relationship and explore whether they do have something real or if it is a transactional fib enacted by a sexually repressed incel incapable of forming a healthy relationship with a real woman. Stay a bit longer with the violence Iris unleashes on the world. Get inside her head a bit more and attempt to parse the paradoxical relationship with reality she clearly can have. But this always straddles the middle of the road because it’s not here to push boundaries or to prod the outer edges of the Overton window. For that kind of stuff we still have Alex Garland and Leigh Whannell, I suppose, and Drew Hancock is here to distil those Black Mirror-esque concepts into an easy and digestible format you can introduce to a couple on a date. A movie you can watch and forget about halfway through when things develop if you know what I mean. Netflix and chill.  

On the wide spectrum of entertainment Companion occupies the same space as straight-to-streaming romantic comedies and in many ways its failure can be described as equivalent to the difference between Annie Hall or Before Sunrise and any conveyor belt rom-com about a young professional woman who quits her job and moves to rural Texas to fall in love with a local cowboy with scars on his emotional resume. Companion is the movie you watch on a night out with your girlfriend because Ex Machina is too cerebral, and Upgrade is too violent. Which is kind of what Don’t Worry Darling was two years back: The Matrix and Stepford Wives filtered through a ready-for-Netflix rom-com mesh. A nice and accessible mindbender you can enjoy as a couple, switch it off, think you may have witnessed something illuminating and then forget all about it because what the movie deals with and the way it goes about doing so makes sure it will leave a grand total of not a whole lot of residual value in your brain. Easy calories. In and out.  

Now, I don’t want to come across as dismissive or anything because there will be people out there who will see Companion as effective and entertaining. Good on them. I’m happy they exist just as I am happy that people who like Netflix rom-coms exist too. Every movie needs to be loved by someone, but what I am saying is that there is a subtle tragedy to what this movie is. A conveyor belt streaming hugfest has a ceiling on what it can do and how it can imprint on the culture at large. It’s there for you to have something to pass the time watching. Meanwhile, the story of Iris the robot who finds out she’s a robot and Josh the incel who gets his comeuppance had an opportunity to traverse into the realm of something more lasting or, dare I say, profound. All it needed were a few tweaks here and there. A few instances of leaning into the upsetting stuff Drew Hancock panned away from consistently. A few moments when the camera would linger on emotionally disconcerting moments without the need to disarm the tension with poorly adjudicated instances of crass humour.  

That’s what pains me the most. Because I see the potential in this movie. I can see the conversation it could have had with me. I can see how it could have added to the body of genre movies that do say profound things while also executing on their mission to entertain. I can see how Sophie Thatcher could have crafted a role to be remembered that cuts through to the core of the eerily undefined term of “toxic masculinity.” But none of this is possible because Companion is just a science fiction dark comedy thriller you can put on when you’re about to Netflix and chill. Because as the name suggest, it’s Netflix and chill, not Netflix and ponder the survival of humanity as AI takes over and men and women wage war against each other.