“What happens when the fake people rebel?” has been a theme in fiction ever since the word “robot” was invented almost a hundred years ago. Now that we’re living In The Future™, however, these kind of stories grow closer and closer to reality as AI inches forward to sentience and Boston Dynamics releases its latest video of an eerily human automaton doing human labour.
Unfortunately Companion isn’t really digging that deep into the metanarrative of fabricated people and it doesn’t provide any new thoughts on the subject that haven’t been done countless times before. Instead what you’re getting is a quite vanilla comedy thriller that veers slightly into horror.
“Companion is a bold, twisted, and unpredictable thriller that tugs at the one loose thread of a seemingly perfect romance, revealing a surprise betrayal that unravels into utter nightmare. Upon the shocking realization of her true self, our heroine Iris must embrace who she is, level up her abilities, and activate in ways she never knew she could, to win not only her own redemption but the battle for ultimate control in a modern tale for our times,” reads the synopsis of the movie we’ve been provided.
As you may have guessed, Iris (played by Sophie Thatcher) is an android owned by her “boyfriend” Josh (played by everyone’s favourite nepo baby Jack Quaid). On a weekend getaway to a secluded cabin in the woods – amazingly original thriller setting there, filmmakers – Iris learns who / what she really is and lots of people die.
Does she become a killer robot? Are the deaths the result of outside forces? Are there other robots? Well that’s the thriller part you’d have to find out by seeing the movie.
Unfortunately, as this story progresses, Companion reveals its hand and the fact that is has nothing new to share combined with a script that is wholly predictable. An essential aspect of a thriller and, well, movies in general, is that the audience should be enraptured and unable to tell where the story goes next.
Companion is not written or executed well enough to create any suspense of its own naturally, so it has to fall on old tricks like milk jumpscares, flashbacks and “creepy” lighting to give the illusion of mystery and suspense.
Companion takes place in the undetermined near future and you can work that out from a single, true self-driving car, the fact that a police officer is forced to drive a Tesla (lookout for that executive mandate to come from Elon’s buddy) and the aforementioned Josh proudly walks around using a foldable phone.
The near future is always a fun place for storytelling as it’s easy to mix the familiar with what may be impossible and fantastical, but again Companion drops the ball. No actual further worldbuilding is done outside of those three minor elements we mentioned already and, of course, the advanced androids.
While this isn’t a must for the story Companion is trying to tell, the fact that the story is so bland means that we really wanted more from the setting.
Now we’re being quite harsh about the plot and its execution here, but we will say that at least the comedy elements of the movie mostly land. We saw this movie in a mostly packed media screening and most jokes brought out laughter from the audience.
Even more than that, there’s a decent amount of blink and you’ll miss it jokes where the writing got to shine, and you can feel a sense of kinship when you hear someone else in the audience laugh as they also caught a small gem that the rest of the viewers didn’t.
To compliment the writing further, the dialogue is mostly grounded and characters talk and behave rationally for the most part as their lives go off the rails. These types of movies fall into the danger zone where characters can look into the camera and lament about their strange lives and bad luck, but for the most part everyone here tries to power through a crisis as best they can.
We can also give out compliments to most of the cast. Quaid is fantastic here and it’s nice to see him playing a character that isn’t the boy scout that most associate him with because of The Boys. The core cast is rounded off by Megan Suri, Lukas Cage, and Harvey Guillén who all put in sterling performances too.
Thatcher, as our main character, puts in what we’d call a patchy performance. In some scenes she’s great and pulling off some believable acting for what is some of the worst stuff anyone has ever experienced. In other scenes, though, she’s wholly unbelievable. We’re placing this at the feet of director and writer Drew Hancock as it’s clear Thatcher can deliver, but he simply didn’t do enough in some scenes to get that best performance out of her.
The visual effects are very minimal in Companion, mostly relying on fake blood and squibs that have been around and perfected in movie making for the longest time, so we don’t really feel like complimenting getting this basic feature done.
On top of this the music simply does nothing in this movie. Not a single note of a single tune is remarkable or memorable. Again, a score can go a long way to selling this kind of movie and making it stand out, but that didn’t happen here.
Companion is a movie of missed marks, unrealised potential and treading the same ground of precursors that came before it. We would be inclined to rate it lower, but we have a nagging feeling that we wouldn’t be so annoyed about this squandered idea if the core elements of the movie didn’t impress on their own.
Companion is a decent film, it really is, but being so close to greatness only makes its flaws stand out more. We’re leaving it with an above average score and an iffy recommendation to see it in theatres.
This is not a movie for those who deeply love sci-fi and the subgenre of artificial humans. Instead, it’s closer to an abused lover revenge plot whose mechanisms just so happen to be robotic. If that further explanation sounds good to you, give this one a chance, otherwise stick to the plethora of other titles focused around the increasingly realistic topic of artificial humans.
FINAL SCORE: 6 OUT OF 10.
